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Oyster Sauce

A sauce made from oyster liquor thickened with flour and butter, flavored with lime juice and sea salt, finished with heavy cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream 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 ↓

Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Remove gills from the oysters and scald them.

  2. Strain the oyster liquor.

Make the sauce

  1. Thicken the liquor with a little flour and butter.

  2. Squeeze in a little lime juice and add coarse sea salt.

  3. Stir in three tablespoons of heavy cream.

  4. Heat the mixture well but do not allow it to boil.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Flour + limetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Oyster + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Flour and butter 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 savoury, briny flavour of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquor so the sauce coats the back of a spoon.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the thickened sauce.
Heavy cream
Adds fat and body, softening the sharpness of the lime and brine.
Lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens the oyster flavour.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture well but do not allow it to boil.. Flour-thickened sauces reach full thickness when hot, but boiling a dairy-containing sauce can cause the cream to separate and the texture to turn grainy or thin. Gentle heating keeps it smooth.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, flour, butter, cream. 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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