Skip to main content
Main

Clam Fritters

A batter of flour, egg, pepper, salt, baking soda, water, and chopped clams, fried in hot lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Clam Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, egg, pepper, salt, and baking soda.

  2. Add enough water to create a batter.

  3. Chop clams very fine and stir them into the batter.

Fry

  1. Heat lard in a pan.

  2. Drop a tablespoonful of batter into the hot lard.

  3. Fry until light brown on both sides.

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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + clamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together576 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Pepper + clamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together952 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Egg + clamtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together337 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Forms the body of the batter, giving the fritters their structure.
Egg
Binds the batter together and helps hold the fritters in shape.
Baking soda
Reacts to lighten the batter so the fritters rise and stay tender.
Chopped clams
Provide the main flavor and texture within the batter.

The step that matters

Dropping batter into hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisping quickly. Enough heat sets the outside fast so the fritters brown evenly and stay light.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes