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Dessert

Oyster Patties

Oyster patties are puff pastry shells filled with stewed oysters, cloves, mace, nutmeg, egg yolk, butter, and oyster liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Oyster Patties

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the shells

  1. Prepare rich puff pastry and bake it in very small patty pans.

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

Make the filling

  1. Stew the oysters with cloves, mace, nutmeg, grated egg yolk, butter, and enough oyster liquor to cover them.

  2. After stewing for a short time, remove the oysters from the pan and let them cool.

Assemble

  1. When completely cool, place two or three oysters in each puff pastry shell.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rich puff pastry
Forms a flaky, crisp shell that holds the filling.
Large fresh oysters
Provide the main filling, becoming tender when gently stewed.
Oyster liquor
Moistens and flavours the stew, carrying the oyster taste through the filling.
1 hard-boiled egg yolk, grated
Enriches the filling and thickens it slightly as it sits.
A little butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the filling a smooth mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stew the oysters only briefly. Oysters toughen and shrink when overcooked, so they should be stewed for a short time only, just until they firm and curl at the edges.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, clove, nutmeg, 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.

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