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Pigs in Blankets

Bacon-wrapped oysters served on toast with celery and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Pigs in Blankets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and wrap

  1. Wash and dry the oysters.

  2. Place a strip of bacon lengthwise on your hand and lay an oyster across the upper end.

  3. Roll the bacon around the oyster towards your fingers and secure with a toothpick.

Broil and serve

  1. Sprinkle the wrapped oysters with pepper, dip in melted butter, and broil.

  2. Serve on hot toast with celery, garnished with lemon and celery leaves.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
The main ingredient, a tender seafood that cooks quickly and stays juicy when heated briefly.
Bacon
Wraps the oysters, rendering fat and crisping during broiling while adding salty, smoky flavor.
Melted butter
Adds fat that promotes browning and richness on the broiled surface.

The step that matters

Broil the wrapped oysters. Oysters cook fast, so overheating makes them tough and shrunken. The bacon needs enough heat to crisp, so watch closely for both to finish at the same time.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, pepper, lemon, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, pepper, lemon, butter. 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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