Skip to main content
Main

Oyster Sauce

A sauce made from oysters, butter, flour, and optional lemon, capers, vinegar, served with boiled turkey.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,222 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a basin over the fire, combine the oysters and boiling water; boil for three minutes.

  2. Skim the surface, then stir in the softened butter and flour until well combined.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil and serve with boiled turkey.

Variation

  1. For a richer sauce, use cream instead of water for the drawn butter, omitting lemon juice and vinegar.

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. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
Provide the main savoury flavour and the briny character of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid so the sauce coats the food rather than running off.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter and flour. Flour needs to be fully combined with the butter and liquid to thicken evenly. Stirring until smooth prevents lumps, which form when flour clumps before it is dispersed in the liquid.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, butter, flour, capers, vinegar):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, butter, flour, capers, vinegar. 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.

More oyster sauce recipes

White 10for Fish 8for Turkey 8Mock 5Brown 4 See all 287 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes