Name: Oystees with Anchovy
Ingredients: 20 oysters; 2 tablespoons butter; 1 heaping teaspoon anchovy paste; a little cayenne pepper; juice of 1 lemon

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Oystees with Anchovy

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

Melt the butter and anchovy paste together in a chafing dish.
Add the oysters and cook for 3 minutes.
Stir in the cayenne pepper and lemon juice.

Serve

Serve on buttered toast or breakfast biscuits.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Oyster + anchovytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together603 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,184 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).
Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,697 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Anchovy + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,080 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: Form the main body of the dish, cooking gently in the butter and anchovy mixture.
Butter: Carries the flavour and adds richness, coating the oysters as they cook.
Anchovy paste: Adds a deep, salty savoury flavour that seasons the oysters and butter.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and balances the salty anchovy.

“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.