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Curried Oysters

A simple oyster dish simmered in butter, flour, and curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Curried Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Drain the liquor from the oysters into a saucepan.

  2. Add the butter, flour, and curry powder to the saucepan and mix well.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the oysters and salt, then boil for a moment.

  2. Serve immediately.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Oyster + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,582 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Butter and flour 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
The main ingredient, whose briny flavour and tender texture define the dish.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Curry powder
Supplies the aromatic spices that give the dish its characteristic flavour.

The step that matters

Add the oysters and boil only for a moment. Oysters are delicate protein. Prolonged boiling tightens their proteins, making them rubbery and shrunken, so they should be added at the end and cooked just until heated through.

“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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