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To Dress Oysters in Cream

Oysters are cooked with sweet cream, butter, and seasonings, thickened with flour, and served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Dress Oysters in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Drain the oysters.

  2. In a braising dish, combine the oysters, sweet cream, butter, salt, black pepper, and red pepper.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook until nearly done.

  2. Thicken the mixture with wheat flour.

  3. Serve hot.

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

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

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Butter + wheattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

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

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 substance and delicate briny flavor of the dish.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the liquid.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel.
Wheat flour
Thickens the cream as its starch gelatinizes with heat, giving body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with wheat flour. Flour must be cooked in the hot liquid long enough for its starch to gelatinize; otherwise the sauce stays pasty or tastes raw. Overcooking oysters, meanwhile, makes them tough and shrunken, so the flour is added once the oysters are nearly done.

“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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