Skip to main content
Main

Oyster Patties

A pastry shell filled with stewed oysters, cloves, mace, egg, butter, and oyster liquor.

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

Why it works: Clove and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Oyster Patties

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cases

  1. Make rich puff paste and bake in small patty pans.

  2. Once cool, turn the pastries out onto a large dish.

Make the filling

  1. Stew fresh oysters with cloves and mace.

  2. Add the grated hard-boiled egg, butter, and enough oyster liquor to cover the oysters.

  3. Let the mixture stew for 2-3 minutes.

  4. When cool, place 2-3 oysters in each puff pastry.

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. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

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

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Mace and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 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

Rich puff paste
Forms the flaky, crisp case that holds the filling.
Fresh oysters
Provide the main seafood flavour and the body of the filling.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds richness and body to the filling as it is stewed.
Butter
Adds fat, richness and smooth mouthfeel to the filling.
Oyster liquor
Supplies moisture and concentrated oyster flavour to the stew.

The step that matters

Stewing the oysters for only 2-3 minutes. Oysters toughen and shrink when overcooked, so they should be stewed just until their edges curl. Letting the liquor cool before adding the oysters also prevents the pastry from going soggy.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, mace, egg, butter):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, mace, egg, butter. 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.

You might also like

Mock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes