Skip to main content
Main

Oyster a LA Poulette

A dish of oysters topped with a butter, lemon, cream, flour, and egg sauce, finished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Oyster a LA Poulette

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Scald the oysters in their own liquor, then remove and season with salt.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter, add lemon juice, cream, and flour, and simmer.

  3. Beat the egg and add it to the sauce, simmer until thickened.

Serve

  1. Place the oysters on a hot dish, pour the sauce over them, and sprinkle with chopped parsley before serving.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  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. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, 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 body and briny flavour of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that gives the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds body and richness, helping the sauce turn smooth and velvety.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid and forming a starch structure as it heats.
Egg
Thickens the sauce through protein setting when gently simmered, adding richness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream sauce and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Simmer the egg into the sauce until thickened. Egg proteins set when heated, thickening the sauce, but if it gets too hot or boils hard the egg can curdle and turn grainy. Keep the heat gentle and stir constantly.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes