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Oyster Cocktail

A chilled appetizer of oysters topped with lemon‑ketchup sauce and served with toasted crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Oyster Cocktail

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Juice the lemons into a bowl.

  2. Mix in the tomato ketchup, Tabasco sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and coarse sea salt.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill small punch glasses with oysters.

  2. Pour the sauce over the oysters.

  3. Serve with hot toasted crackers.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + tomatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

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

  3. Sauce + oystertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Tomato + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,469 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Ketchup + oystertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together318 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Provide the main briny, delicate seafood base of the cocktail.
Lemons
Add bright acidity that cuts the richness of the oysters and sauce.
Tomato ketchup
Adds sweetness, body and a tangy tomato flavour to the sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, ketchup, sauce, oyster):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Grapefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, ketchup, sauce, oyster. 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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