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Oyster Pot-pie

A savory pie made with oysters, biscuit dough, and a creamy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 Pot-pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. Scald the oysters in their own liquor until boiling, then skim out the oysters and set aside.

  2. Add hot water to the liquor, season with salt and pepper, and stir in butter.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour and cold milk.

Cook and serve

  1. Roll out biscuit dough to twice the thickness of pie crust, cut into 1-inch squares, and drop into the boiling stew.

  2. Cover and cook for 40 minutes.

  3. Stir the oysters into the stew and serve together in one dish.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Flour + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 flavor and tender bite of the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the broth.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a stew by swelling with heat.
Biscuit dough
Cooks in the stew to form soft dumplings that absorb some of the broth.

The step that matters

Drop the biscuit dough into the boiling stew. The stew must be actively boiling when the dough goes in, so the dough cooks through on the surface and does not sink into a heavy, gummy mass before the starch and heat set it.

“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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