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Oyster Sauce

A sauce made with oysters, butter, flour, milk, cream, anchovy essence, and salt.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Blend in the flour and stir well.

  3. Add the milk and bring to a boil for 3 minutes, stirring continually.

Finish the sauce

  1. Remove the gills from the oysters and add them to the saucepan along with the cream and anchovy essence.

  2. Season with salt and heat the mixture, but do not boil.

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. Oyster + anchovytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated with the milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that becomes a smooth, pourable sauce.
Oysters
Provide the main briny, savoury flavour of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder mouthfeel.
Anchovy essence
Adds a concentrated savoury depth without making the sauce taste fishy.

The step that matters

Heat the oysters without boiling. Oysters toughen and shrink when overheated, and dairy-based sauces can curdle or separate at a rolling boil. Gentle heat keeps the oysters tender and the sauce smooth.

“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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