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Oyster Pie

A savory pie with oysters, eggs, butter, flour, parsley, nutmeg, pepper, salt, vinegar, and pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Oyster Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the eggs until very light.

  2. Drain the oysters from their liquor and simmer them in a stewpan for 5 minutes.

Make the filling

  1. Melt the butter without boiling it, then stir in the flour until smooth.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, chopped parsley, nutmeg, pepper, salt, and vinegar to the butter mixture and mix well.

  3. Combine this mixture with the oysters and let it simmer together for 10 minutes.

Bake

  1. Place the mixture into the pastry and bake immediately to prevent the under crust from becoming clammy.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 bulk of the pie filling.
Eggs
Bind the filling and help it set as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor through the filling.
Flour
Thickens the butter mixture so the filling holds together.

The step that matters

Bake immediately after filling the pastry. Filling the pastry and baking right away keeps the moisture from soaking into the raw crust. A delay lets the under crust turn soggy and clammy, while the filling is already wet and hot enough to start cooking the pastry.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, egg, flour, butter, vinegar, parsley, pepper):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Dillfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, egg, flour, butter, vinegar, parsley, 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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