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Scallops and Oysters

A seafood dish of scallops and oysters served with a butter‑flour‑cream sauce on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Scallops and Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the seafood

  1. Steam the scallops and oysters.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, blend the butter and flour.

  2. Add the cream, salt, cayenne, and lemon juice to the mixture.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg yolks.

  4. Mix the sauce with the scallops and oysters.

Serve

  1. Serve on thin slices of 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour when blended with flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid as it cooks with the butter.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce gently when stirred in off the heat, giving it a smooth, silky texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances the seafood.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the sauce is too hot when they go in, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy, so remove the pan from the heat first.

“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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