Skip to main content
Main

Ragout of Oysters for Vol-au-vent

A creamy oyster ragout seasoned with butter, flour, and spices, served in a vol-au-vent.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Ragout of Oysters for Vol-au-vent

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Remove all shell particles from the oysters and strain their liquor to remove sand.

Make the sauce

  1. In a thick saucepan, melt the butter and flour over medium heat until bubbling.

  2. Gradually stir in enough oyster liquor to create a sauce thick enough to coat the spoon.

  3. Season the sauce with salt, pepper, and a pinch of grated nutmeg, then bring to a boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the oysters and stir until their edges curl.

  2. For a richer sauce, stir in the egg yolks off the heat, then add oil and lemon juice gradually.

  3. Heat the vol-au-vent case in the oven 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 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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 flavour of the ragout.
Flour
Thickens the butter and oyster liquor into a smooth sauce that coats the oysters.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the sauce, and cooks with the flour to form the roux base.
Egg yolks
Add richness and body to the sauce when stirred in off the heat.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. If the yolks are stirred into a hot sauce, they can scramble and curdle. Removing the pan from the heat before adding them lets the yolks thicken the sauce gently and smoothly.

“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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes