Name: Oyster Pie
Ingredients: pastry for pie; raw oysters; 2 tablespoons butter; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Oyster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,184 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Oyster Pie

Ingredients

pastry for pie
raw oysters
2 tablespoons butter
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Assemble

Line a dish with pie pastry.
Pour raw oysters into the dish.
Add butter and season with coarse sea salt.

Bake

Cover with crust and bake for 30 minutes.

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.

Oyster + buttertop 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

Pastry for pie: Encloses the filling and forms a crust that browns in the oven.
Raw oysters: Main filling that gives the pie its savory, briny flavor and tender texture.
Butter: Adds fat that enriches the oysters and adds moisture and flavor.

“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.