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Oyster Bisque

A creamy oyster bisque made with oysters, cream, spices, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Oyster Bisque

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Remove gills from oysters by dropping them into a hot frying pan and turning until plumped and ruffled on both sides.

  2. Skim out the oysters and add the liquor to a pot with cream, bay leaf, mace, cayenne, paprika, salt, and lemon juice.

Make the bisque

  1. Skim the liquor thoroughly when it boils, then return the oysters chopped finely.

  2. As soon as it boils again, add the flour moistened with cold milk and stir constantly for five minutes.

  3. Add the butter and serve immediately when it melts.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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 flavour and the body of the bisque once chopped and returned to the liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as it boils and is stirred, giving the bisque body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a rounded, glossy finish when stirred in at the end.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the cream.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour thickens only when it boils, and stirring keeps it from clumping. Adding it lumpy or to a liquid that is not boiling leaves a grainy texture that does not thicken evenly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, cream, pepper, lemon, flour, milk, 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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