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Clam Soup

A soup made with clams, water, milk, butter, flour, and optional crackers, seasoned with pepper, salt, mace, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Clam Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Drain the liquor from the clams and put it in a pot with 1 cup of water.

  2. Add the chopped clams and boil for 30 minutes.

  3. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and add the butter.

  4. Bring to a boil again and add the boiling hot milk.

  5. Mix the flour with a little cold milk to make a cream and stir it in.

  6. Optionally, add rolled crackers, mace, and lemon juice to taste.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Clam + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together840 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Clams
Provide the main flavor and seafood body of the soup.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the soup.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy texture when stirred in as a cream.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour cream. Flour mixed with cold milk first disperses evenly; added directly to hot liquid it clumps. The soup should then be kept near, not at, a rolling boil so the starch thickens smoothly without scorching the milk.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clam, milk, flour, butter, egg, pepper, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clam, milk, flour, butter, egg, pepper, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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