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Soft Clams in Chafing-dish

Soft clams cooked with butter, flour, cayenne, and sherry served on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Soft Clams in Chafing-dish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the clams

  1. Wash the clams thoroughly and plunge them into boiling water for a moment.

  2. Drain and open the clams, using only the round, plump part.

Cook

  1. In a chafing dish, heat the butter until hot.

  2. Add a dash of flour and a pinch of Cayenne pepper to the butter.

  3. Add the clams and cook slightly.

  4. Pour in the sherry.

  5. Cover the dish and simmer for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the clams on toast.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clam + sherrytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Pepper + sherrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

Butter and flour 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

Clams
Provide the main protein and briny flavor that the dish is built around.
Butter
Carries the heat and adds richness and fat to the sauce.
Flour
Lightly thickens the butter and sherry so the liquid clings to the clams.
Light sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth that balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Cover the dish and simmer for 5 minutes. Simmering gently keeps the clams tender; high heat or overcooking toughens clam muscle and makes it rubbery. Covering traps steam so the clams cook evenly in the liquid.

“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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