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Oyster Cromkskies

Bacon‑wrapped oysters served with a butter, lemon, cayenne, and egg yolk sauce on buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Oyster Cromkskies

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Scald the oysters in their own liquor over high heat until plump.

  2. Wrap each oyster in a slice of bacon and secure with a toothpick.

  3. Sauté the wrapped oysters in a hot pan until cooked.

  4. In a separate pan, add the oysters and wait until they plump and the edges curl.

Finish and serve

  1. Add butter, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne to the oysters.

  2. Mix a few spoonfuls of the oyster liquor with the egg yolks, then pour into the chafing dish.

  3. Stir constantly until the mixture thickens, then serve on thin slices of buttered 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

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

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 form the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture as they set gently with heat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the richness of the butter and oysters.

The step that matters

Stir constantly while the yolk mixture thickens. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but if they get too hot they scramble into lumps. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly so the mixture thickens smoothly.

“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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