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Sauce

Common Oyster Sauce

A sauce made from oysters, melted butter, and optional cayenne and anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Oyster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and 8,184 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Common Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove gills from the oysters and prepare them as directed.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the strained liquor from the oysters to the melted butter and stir until it boils.

  2. Add the oysters and heat through without delay.

  3. Serve the sauce immediately, adding cayenne and essence of anchovies if desired.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together8,184 recipes

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

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 tender texture of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty body to the sauce.
Oyster liquor
Adds the briny, savoury flavour of the oysters to the butter.

The step that matters

Heat the oysters through without delay. Oysters overcook quickly and turn rubbery when held at high heat, so they should be warmed just until heated through.

“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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