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Vegetable Oyster Toast

A toast topped with a creamy mixture of vegetable oysters, milk, cream, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Vegetable Oyster Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the creamed oysters

  1. Cook the vegetable oysters in water until very tender.

  2. Add milk, cream, and salt to the cooked oysters.

  3. Rub flour with a little milk to make a smooth paste, then thicken the mixture with it.

  4. Let the mixture boil for a few minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over slices of well-browned 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Oyster + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  4. Oyster + milktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,933 recipes

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

  5. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Vegetable oysters
Provide the main body and flavor of the dish once cooked until tender.
Milk
Adds liquid and richness, forming the base of the creamy sauce.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smoother, silkier texture.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a sauce when mixed into a paste and boiled.

The step that matters

Thickening with the flour paste. Flour must be smoothed in a little milk before adding, otherwise it clumps. Boiling for a few minutes is needed so the starch swells and fully thickens the sauce.

“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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