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Fricassee of Oysters

A creamy oyster dish with butter, flour, egg yolks, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fricassee of Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove gills from oysters and set aside.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt butter over medium heat until bubbling.

  2. Sprinkle in flour and cook for 1 minute, stirring with a whisk.

  3. Add oyster liquor and mix well.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in egg yolks, salt, cayenne, lemon juice, and nutmeg.

  5. Return to heat and cook gently to set the eggs without boiling.

Finish

  1. Add oysters and heat through.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and gives it a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquor and butter into a stable sauce that holds the oysters.
Oyster liquor
Supplies the main briny oyster flavour and the liquid base of the sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce as they gently set with heat.

The step that matters

Return to heat and cook gently to set the eggs without boiling.. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, around the point where their proteins set. If the sauce boils, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy, and the sauce breaks.

“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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