Name: Oyster Pie
Ingredients: deep dish pastry; oysters; sliced potatoes; seasoning; thick, rich pastry for topping

Why it works: Oyster and potato work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 229 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Oyster Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Assemble

Line a deep dish with pastry.
Fill the dish with layers of oysters and sliced potatoes.
Season the layers to taste.
Cover with thick, rich pastry.

Bake

Bake for 1 hour at 350°F (175°C).

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.

Oyster + potatotop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together229 recipes

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

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 filling and their briny flavour as they cook.
Sliced potatoes: Add bulk and soft body between the oyster layers as the pie bakes.
Pastry: Forms the crust that encloses the filling and holds in moisture while baking.

“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.