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To Boil Soft-shell Clams

Boiled soft-shell clams served with butter and rolls.

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 ↓

To Boil Soft-shell Clams

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Steam the clams

  1. Wash the clams thoroughly and place them in a kettle with the edges downwards.

  2. Pour 1 quart of boiling water over the clams and cover the pot.

  3. Cook over a brisk fire for 45 minutes until the shells open.

Clean and serve

  1. Remove the clams and discard the black skin covering the hard part.

  2. Trim and clean the clams, then place them in a stew pan.

  3. Add some of the cooking liquid, a good amount of butter, and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Heat the mixture and serve with cold butter and rolls.

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. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Clam + peppertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together952 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Soft-shell clams
Provide the main protein, which becomes tender and sweet when steamed open.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky, moist texture to the clams and their cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking until the shells open. Clams that stay closed may be dead or not fully cooked, and heat should be steady so the meat cooks through without turning tough.

“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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