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Vegetable Oyster

A fried cake made from mashed vegetable oyster, cream, flour, egg, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Vegetable Oyster

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the vegetable oyster.

  2. Boil the vegetable oyster until tender, then mash it finely.

  3. Mix in the cream, salt, flour, and beaten egg.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat the butter or frying fat in a frying pan until boiling hot.

  2. Form the mixture into cakes and place them in the pan.

  3. Cook until one side is brown.

  4. Turn the cakes and drizzle some of the fat over them before serving.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Vegetable oyster
Forms the main body of the cakes once boiled and mashed.
Egg
Binds the mashed mixture so the cakes hold their shape.
Flour
Adds body to the mixture, helping it hold together while frying.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the mixture soft inside.

The step that matters

Cook until one side is brown. Browning develops flavour through the Maillard reaction, but the cakes are fragile, so they should be turned only once the underside is set and golden to avoid breaking.

“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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