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Sauce

Common Oyster Sauce

A sauce made from oysters, their liquor, melted butter, and optional cayenne pepper and anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Oyster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and 8,184 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Common Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare and plump the oysters by removing the gills.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain the liquor from the oysters and combine it with melted butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir the mixture until it boils.

  3. Add the oysters and heat them through.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce immediately, adding cayenne and essence of anchovies if desired.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together8,184 recipes

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

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Oyster + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together7,663 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

Oysters
Provide the main flavour and tender, briny body of the sauce.
Oyster liquor
Supplies concentrated sea-salt flavour and liquid to thin the butter into a sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Milk
Adds milk solids and a mild sweetness to the butter base when used in place of water.

The step that matters

Heating the oysters in the sauce. Oysters turn firm and rubbery if overheated. Adding them last and heating only until warmed through keeps them tender while the sauce is kept just below a hard boil.

“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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