Skip to main content
Main

Oyster Soup

A creamy soup made with oysters, milk or cream, butter, crackers, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Oyster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Boil the milk or cream in a pot.

  2. Remove the gills from the oysters and boil them, skimming off any foam.

  3. Add the oysters to the boiling milk and cook for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Crush the crackers and place them in a soup tureen.

  2. Add the butter to the crackers, then pour the hot soup over them.

  3. Serve immediately, seasoning with pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Milk + oystertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Milk + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk or cream
Forms the liquid base of the soup and gives it a rich, smooth body.
Oysters
Provide the main flavour and tender texture of the soup.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, softening the crackers and rounding out the flavour.
Crackers
Soak up the hot liquid, thickening the soup and adding body.

The step that matters

Adding the oysters to the boiling milk. Oysters turn tough and rubbery when overcooked, so they should cook only for the stated short time in the hot milk. Skimming foam from the oysters first keeps the soup clean and smooth.

“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.

More oyster soup recipes

Mock 19White 16Vegetable 8Chicken 3Cream 3 See all 520 →

You might also like

Corn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes