Skip to main content
Main

Oysters Bellevue

Oysters cooked in a butter, celery, and cream sauce with cracker dust and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Oysters Bellevue

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a chafing dish, melt the butter.

  2. Add pepper, salt, and mustard; stir well.

  3. Add the finely chopped celery and let it boil with the cream.

  4. Stir in the cracker dust to thicken the broth.

Cook and serve

  1. Once boiling, drop in the oysters one by one.

  2. Cook for about 1 minute, then add sherry or Madeira.

  3. Serve very hot.

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. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, 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 seafood and tender texture once briefly cooked in the hot cream.
Cream
Forms the rich body of the sauce and adds moisture and fat.
Table butter
Adds fat and richness as the base for the sauce.
Cracker dust
Thickens the broth so the sauce clings to the oysters.
Celery
Adds a mild, fresh vegetable flavor and some texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the oysters for about 1 minute once the sauce is boiling. Oysters toughen and shrink quickly when overcooked, so they should be added to the boiling sauce and cooked only briefly until they just firm up.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, celery, cream, oyster, sherry. 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.

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesMock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipes