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Oyster Pie

A savory pie filled with oysters, milk, butter, eggs, and crackers, baked in a puff pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Oyster Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a pot, combine milk, water, and butter. Heat until scalding hot.

  2. Mix flour with a little milk until smooth, then add to the pot and cook until thickened.

  3. Stir in the beaten eggs, rolled crackers, and oysters, allowing to scald while thinning as needed.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Prepare the crust

  1. For the crust, prepare puff pastry, line the baking dish, and bake.

  2. Prick the bottom crust with a fork to prevent blistering.

  3. Cut the upper crust to fit the dish and bake on heavy paper if necessary.

Assemble

  1. Pour the mixture into a baked pie crust.

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

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 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 + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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 flavor and texture of the filling.
Eggs
Beaten eggs thicken the hot filling and help it set.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the filling.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, stable base.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the flour thickens.
Rolled crackers
Add body and help soak up liquid in the filling.

The step that matters

Scalding without boiling the eggs. Eggs thicken when heated but curdle if they boil hard, so the filling should be kept just below boiling while the beaten eggs are stirred in and the oysters scald.

“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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