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Delicious Oyster Bisque

A creamy soup made from oysters, celery, milk, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Delicious Oyster Bisque

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Cover the chopped celery with water and stew slowly for 30 minutes.

  2. Drain and wash the oysters, then place them in a saucepan and cook over heat for at least 5 minutes.

  3. Drain the oysters, saving the liquor, and mix them with the celery.

Make the bisque

  1. Add the milk to the mixture.

  2. Rub together the butter and flour, then add to the mixture and cook for an additional 10 minutes.

  3. Strain through a sieve and add the white pepper.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 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. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

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

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Oysters
Provide the main seafood flavor and tender body to the bisque.
Milk
Forms the creamy base and adds richness and body to the soup.
Butter and flour
Rubbed together to thicken the bisque as the flour cooks in the fat.
Celery
Adds a savory, aromatic vegetable flavor to the base.

The step that matters

Rub the butter and flour together before adding. Blending the butter and flour into a paste before adding it keeps the flour from clumping, so the bisque thickens smoothly rather than becoming lumpy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, oyster, milk, butter, flour):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, oyster, milk, butter, flour. 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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