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Creamed Oysters

A creamy oyster dish made by boiling oysters, mixing with cream, flour, milk, seasoning, and serving over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Creamed Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream sauce

  1. Heat the cream in a double boiler.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold milk and stir into the boiling cream.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt and cayenne pepper.

Cook the oysters and serve

  1. Boil the oysters in their own liquor, then drain them.

  2. Add the oysters to the cream mixture.

  3. Butter the toast and place the mixture over it.

  4. Serve immediately.

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. Flour + buttertop 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Oysters
Form the main body of the dish and supply its briny flavor.
Cream
Provides richness and a smooth, silky texture for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a sauce that coats the oysters.
Butter
Adds richness and browns lightly on the toast for flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the boiling cream. Flour mixed with cold milk first disperses evenly, so it thickens the cream smoothly. Added dry or in lumps, it forms clumps that stay raw-tasting and grainy in the sauce.

“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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