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Mock Clam Soup

A bean soup made with marrowfat beans, onion, water, savory, butter, cream, toast, and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and summer savory share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 39 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Mock Clam Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the marrowfat beans overnight in enough water to cover them.

  2. Drain the beans and place them in a pot with the onion and cold water; boil until tender and strain.

Make the soup

  1. Add summer savory, butter, cream or milk, salt, and pepper to the stock; bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Cut the toast into dice and slice the hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Place the toast and egg slices in a tureen and pour the soup over them; serve immediately.

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. Beans + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Summer savory + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together671 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + summer savorytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together299 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Marrowfat beans
Provide the body and starchy base that thickens the soup and gives it its clam-like texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Cream or rich milk
Adds fat and creaminess, softening the flavor and smoothing the texture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add protein-based richness and a firm, soft contrast to the smooth broth.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until tender. Dried marrowfat beans must cook fully before straining; undercooked beans stay firm and grainy, and the starch that gives the soup body is not released properly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, summer savory, butter, cream, pepper, egg):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, summer savory, butter, cream, pepper, egg. 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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