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Stewed Clams

Stewed clams simmered in a butter and flour gravy seasoned with white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Clam and butter work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 840 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Stewed Clams

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the clams

  1. Wash the clams thoroughly.

  2. Place the clams in a large iron pot with ½ cup of hot water and heat over the fire until the shells open.

  3. Remove the clams and cut off the hard fringe with clean scissors.

Make the stew

  1. Put the clams in a stew pan with the broth from the pot and boil slowly until tender.

  2. Season with white pepper and thicken the gravy with flour stirred into melted butter.

  3. Serve immediately to avoid overcooking.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Clam + flourtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together576 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Clam + white peppertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together47 recipes
  5. Butter + white peppertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Round clams
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender as they simmer in their broth.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as its starch swells when heated in the broth.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flour so it blends smoothly into the gravy.

The step that matters

Boil slowly until tender, then serve at once. Clam muscle toughens and turns rubbery when held at a boil for too long, so the simmer should be gentle and stopped as soon as the clams are tender.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clam, flour, butter):

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clam, flour, butter. 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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