Skip to main content
Main

Scalloped Oysters

Oysters baked with bread crumbs, butter, pepper, salt, and topped with crackers or biscuits, served with ham slices.

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

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Scalloped Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Assemble

  1. Remove oysters from their liquor and place them in the bottom of a dish or pan.

  2. Cover oysters with bread crumbs, butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Add another layer of oysters, followed by more bread crumbs.

  4. Repeat layers until the dish is full.

  5. Top with grated crackers or small champion biscuits.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes.

  2. Serve with slices of ham.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + hamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Bread + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together319 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Provide the main body and briny flavor of the dish.
Bread crumbs
Soak up oyster liquor and add body between the layers.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top brown in the oven.
Grated crackers or small champion biscuits
Form a crisp, golden topping during baking.

The step that matters

Repeating the layers until the dish is full. Layering evenly distributes the crumbs and butter between the oysters, so the dish cooks uniformly and does not turn dry in some spots or soggy in others.

“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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes