Name: Soft Clams
Ingredients: Pork, diced; Clams; Brown bread

Why it works: Pork and clam work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 305 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Soft Clams

Ingredients

Pork, diced
Clams
Brown bread

Directions

Fry the diced pork until crisp.
Sauté the clams in the pork fat.
Serve the clams with brown bread.

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.

Pork + clamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together305 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).
Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,371 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Clam + breadtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together125 recipes

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