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Oyster Bisque

A creamy oyster soup made with oysters, cream, onions, celery, mace, parsley, bay leaf, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Oyster Bisque

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Scald the oysters and their liquor, then separate them after heating to boiling point.

  2. Strain the liquor through cheesecloth, reheat, and thicken with the butter and flour.

Make the base

  1. Scald the cream with the onion, celery, mace, parsley, and bay leaf.

  2. Remove the seasonings and add the cream to the oyster liquor.

Finish and serve

  1. Finally, add the oysters and serve hot with whipped cream on top.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 flavor and tender bite of the bisque.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety body.
Butter
Enriches the liquor and helps build the thickened base with flour.
Flour
Thickens the oyster liquor into a smooth, body-giving base.

The step that matters

Thickening the oyster liquor with butter and flour. Flour must be cooked into the butter and then reheated with the liquor so starch swells evenly. Adding it raw or unevenly leads to lumps and a pasty texture.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, cream, onion, celery, parsley, 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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