Skip to main content
Main

Vegetable Oyster

Vegetable oysters are boiled and served in a buttered milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Vegetable Oyster

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut vegetable oysters into 1‑inch pieces and soak in cold water briefly.

  2. Boil them like green peas until tender.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Drain the water and pour it over milk or cream thickened with flour.

  2. Season with butter, pepper, and salt.

  3. Bring to a boil and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Vegetable oysters
Main vegetable that forms the bulk of the dish and turns tender when boiled.
Milk or cream
Provides the liquid and creamy body of the sauce.
Flour
Starch that thickens the milk or cream into a sauce when heated.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil and serve. Flour starch thickens the milk only as it heats, and milk can scorch or boil over on the bottom of the pan. Stir while heating so the sauce thickens evenly without sticking.

“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.

More vegetable oyster recipes

Soup 8Cakes 3 See all 4 →

You might also like

Mock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes