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Oyster Soup

A creamy soup made with oysters, water, cream, milk, butter, flour, mace, red pepper, and sea salt.

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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Strain the liquor from the oysters.

  2. In a pot, combine the strained liquor, water, cream, and milk.

  3. Add the butter and flour mixture, mace, red pepper, and salt.

Finish the soup

  1. Boil for 10 to 15 minutes.

  2. Add the oysters and boil for a few moments until cooked.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Main ingredient, supplying the soup's briny, savoury flavour and tender texture.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel from its fat.
Milk
Adds body and a mild sweetness from its milk sugar to the broth.
Flour
Thickens the broth as its starch swells with heat.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and combines with the flour to form the thickening base.

The step that matters

Add the oysters at the end. Oysters toughen and turn rubbery when they are overcooked. Adding them last and boiling only briefly, until they just firm up, keeps them tender.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, cream, milk, egg, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, cream, milk, egg, butter, flour, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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