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Oyster Ketchup

A sauce made by boiling oysters with sherry, salt, cayenne pepper, and mace, then straining and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Oyster Ketchup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Remove the gills from the oysters.

  2. Pound the oysters in a small marble mortar.

  3. Strain the juice from the oysters.

Make and bottle the ketchup

  1. Add the sherry, salt, cayenne, and mace to the oyster juice.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Strain it through a sieve.

  4. Let it cool.

  5. Bottle it.

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 + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Sherry + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Sherry + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Oyster + sherrytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Oyster + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 flavor and body of the ketchup.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the liquid.
Ground mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor.
Cayenne pepper
Adds sharp heat to the mixture.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Boiling heats the liquid enough to drive off some of the sherry's alcohol and to kill microbes, and it helps the spices blend into the juice. Overheating can make the flavor harsh, so watch it closely.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, sherry, pepper. 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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