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Creamed Oyster

Creamed Oyster is a dish of oysters cooked in a thickened cream sauce served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter 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 ↓

Creamed Oyster

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Thicken the cream or milk with a little flour as for gravy.

  2. When cooked, add the oysters with their liquor.

  3. Season with pepper, salt, and butter.

Serve

  1. Prepare a platter with slices of browned toast.

  2. Pour the creamed oysters over the toast and serve hot.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 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 + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 body and briny flavor of the creamed dish.
Cream or sweet milk
Forms the creamy base that carries the oysters and sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a gravy-like sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that rounds out the sauce.
Toast
Gives a crisp, absorbent base that holds the creamed oysters.

The step that matters

Thickening the cream or milk with flour. Flour must be cooked long enough to lose its raw taste and to thicken the liquid evenly. Stirring it in gradually before it cooks helps prevent lumps, which would spoil the smooth sauce.

“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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Plant 3

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