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Clam Soup

A soup of clams, veal, herbs, spices, butter, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Clam Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the clams

  1. Put clams in a pot of boiling water until they open.

  2. Remove them from their shells, saving the liquor.

Make the soup

  1. Mix the clam liquor with 3 quarts of water in a large pot.

  2. Add the chopped knuckle of veal.

  3. Simmer for 4 hours.

  4. Add sweet herbs, nutmeg, mace, and whole pepper. Do not add salt.

  5. Stew slowly for 1 hour.

  6. Strain the mixture.

  7. Return the liquor to the pot.

  8. Add the butter pieces and stir until melted.

  9. Cut the clams into pieces and add them to the pot.

  10. Let it boil for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted bread cut into dice.

  2. Optionally, add small forcemeat balls made from cold veal or chicken, chopped suet, sweet marjoram, hard-boiled eggs, lemon peel, and nutmeg.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Clams
Provide the main flavour and body of the broth, and the meat served in the soup.
Knuckle of veal
Simmered for hours, it releases gelatin and savoury flavour that give the broth body.
Butter
Melted in at the end, it adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the broth.
Whole pepper
Infused into the simmering broth, it adds gentle aromatic heat.

The step that matters

Simmering the veal knuckle. A long, gentle simmer draws gelatin and flavour from the bone into the water. Boiling hard instead can cloud the broth and make it greasy.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against clam, veal, nutmeg, pepper, butter, flour, bread. 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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