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Oyster Plant

A dish of small cakes made from oyster plant, pepper, salt, flour, and butter, boiled, mashed, seasoned, formed, floured, and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Oyster Plant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape the oyster plant clean.

  2. Boil it for 1 hour.

Make the cakes

  1. Mash it in a pan with a potato masher.

  2. Season with a little pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Form into small cakes, about the size of a teacup top.

  4. Flour the cakes well.

Cook

  1. Fry them in butter.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Oyster + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Oyster plant
Forms the bulk of the cake, giving it a soft, mashable body and mild, sweet flavor.
Flour
Coats the outside of the cakes so they brown evenly and develop a crisp crust when fried.
Butter
Fries the cakes, adding richness and browning the flour coating through milk solids and heat.

The step that matters

Flour the cakes well. A thick, even flour coating gives the cakes a crisp, golden crust when fried. Thin or patchy coverage can leave bare spots that stick to the pan or brown unevenly.

“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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