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Oyster Soup

A soup made with oysters, water, milk, mace, clove, flour, butter, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Oyster Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Wash the oysters.

  2. Strain their liquor to remove sediment.

  3. Combine the oyster liquor with water, ground mace, coarse sea salt, and ground clove in a pot.

  4. Bring to a boil.

  5. Strain the mixture through a cloth.

Make the soup

  1. Add the milk and oysters.

  2. Bring to a boil again.

  3. Mix the flour with a little water to form a smooth paste.

  4. Stir it into the soup.

  5. Remove from heat.

  6. Add a piece of butter to the soup.

Serve

  1. Toast the bread slices until well dried.

  2. Cut them into small squares.

  3. Place them in a dish.

  4. Pour the soup over the toasted bread.

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. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 seafood flavour and tender texture in the soup.
Milk
Adds richness and a creamy body to the broth.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when stirred in as a paste.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded, rich flavour at the end.
Bread
Soaks up the soup and gives a dry, toasted base to the dish.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into the soup. Flour lumps if added dry or unsmoothed. A smooth paste mixed into hot liquid disperses evenly, and the starch then thickens the soup as it heats.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, milk, clove, flour, butter, bread):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, milk, clove, flour, butter, bread. 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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