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Oyster Pie

A savory pie made with oysters, butter, bread crumbs, milk, egg yolks, and a pie crust.

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 ↓

Oyster Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Strain the liquor from the oysters and boil it with butter and pepper.

  2. Mix bread crumbs and milk in a bowl, then add to the boiling liquor.

  3. After boiling for a few minutes, add the oysters and cook for 5 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten yolks of three eggs.

Bake and serve

  1. Line a buttered dish with the pie crust and fill it with white paper or a clean napkin.

  2. Cover with another layer of pie crust and bake until lightly browned.

  3. Remove the lid, take out the paper, pour in the oyster mixture, and bake for a few more minutes.

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

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Oyster liquor
Provides the savoury broth that flavours the whole filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and gives a smooth mouthfeel.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in milk and boiled, they thicken the liquid into a body for the filling.
Milk
Softens the bread crumbs and adds creaminess to the thickened filling.
Egg yolks
Stirred in off the heat, they enrich and bind the filling as it sets.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat. Adding them to a boiling mixture can scramble them into lumps, so they should be stirred in after removing it from the heat.

“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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