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Oyster Pie with Two Eggs

A baked oyster pie made with oysters, butter, salt, pepper, flour, cream, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Oyster Pie with Two Eggs

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Drain the liquor from the oysters.

  2. Boil the oysters with butter, salt, and pepper.

Make the gravy

  1. Mix flour with cream and stir into the oyster liquor; allow to thicken.

  2. Stir in the beaten yolks of the eggs and add the oysters; cook for three minutes.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover a buttered dish with pastry and support the lid with a paper cup.

  2. Bake, then remove the cover and cup, fill the dish with oysters and gravy.

  3. Return to the oven until the oysters curl.

  4. Remove from the oven, cover, and serve.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
Provide the main flavour and texture of the filling, curling when cooked through.
Eggs
Yolks thicken the gravy as they set with gentle heat, giving it a richer body.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, combining with flour to form the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the cream and oyster liquor into a smooth gravy.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the oysters as they cook.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble and turn grainy if the gravy is too hot or boiling. Stir them in gently over low heat, off the boil, so the gravy stays smooth and creamy.

“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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