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Oyster Patties

A pastry shell filled with stewed oysters, egg, butter, and spices.

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 pastry

  1. Prepare rich puff pastry.

  2. Bake the pastry in small patty pans until golden.

  3. Cool the pastry shells.

  4. Turn the cooled shells onto a large dish.

Make the oyster filling

  1. Stew the oysters with a few cloves, a pinch of mace, and nutmeg.

  2. Add the grated hard-boiled egg and a little butter to the oysters.

  3. Pour in enough oyster liquid to cover the mixture. Stew briefly.

  4. Remove the oysters from the pan and let them cool completely.

Assemble

  1. 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

Puff pastry
Forms the flaky, golden shell that holds the filling.
Large fresh oysters
Provide the main filling and its briny, savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the filling.
Hard-boiled egg
Grated into the filling, it thickens the mixture slightly and adds body.
Oyster liquid
Moistens the filling and carries the oyster flavour through the stew.

The step that matters

Stew briefly after adding the oyster liquid. Oysters toughen and shrink quickly when overcooked. A short, gentle stew cooks them just through while keeping them tender and juicy inside the pastry.

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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