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Creamed Oysters

Creamed oysters are oysters cooked in a thickened cream sauce, seasoned with pepper, sea salt, and butter, served hot over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Creamed Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Thicken the cream or sweet milk with a little flour over heat, as for gravy.

Combine and season

  1. Add the oysters along with their liquor to the thickened mixture.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and butter.

Serve

  1. Serve the creamed oysters hot over slices of nicely browned toast.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  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 + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,545 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
Provide the main flavour and tender texture that the creamy sauce surrounds.
Cream or sweet milk
Forms the rich, smooth base of the sauce, adding moisture and body.
Flour
Thickens the cream or milk into a gravy-like sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, rounding out the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the cream or sweet milk with flour. Flour must be heated in the liquid so its starch swells and gelatinises; otherwise the sauce stays thin or tastes raw and floury. Stirring keeps it smooth and lump-free.

“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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