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Creamed Oysters

Creamed oysters are oysters simmered in a cream sauce with flour, milk, butter, onion, mace, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the cream with the onion and mace.

  2. Mix the flour with ⅓ cup of milk and stir into the boiling cream.

  3. Season with salt and pepper and cook for 10 minutes.

Add the oysters

  1. While the cream is cooking, bring the oysters to a boil, skim, strain, and pour into the boiling cream.

  2. Be careful not to overcook the oysters.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Are the main ingredient, providing the dish's flavor and tender texture when cooked briefly.
Cream
Forms the rich base of the sauce, giving body and a smooth, creamy mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the boiling cream into a smooth sauce as its starch gelatinizes.

The step that matters

Be careful not to overcook the oysters. Oysters toughen and shrink when heated too long, because their proteins contract. Adding them to the hot cream and removing them once their edges curl keeps them tender.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, cream, flour, milk, egg, butter, onion. 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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