Skip to main content
Main

Quick Curry of Oysters

A quick oyster curry made with butter, garlic, curry powder, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Quick Curry of Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Drain the oysters and place them in a bowl on a saucer.

  2. Mince the garlic and set it aside.

Cook

  1. In the chafing dish, melt the butter over medium heat until hot but not browned.

  2. Add the oysters to the melted butter.

  3. Sprinkle the curry powder, pepper, and salt over the oysters.

  4. Rub the spoon with the minced garlic and stir until the mixture is boiling.

  5. Serve directly from the chafing 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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

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

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Provide the main ingredient, cooked briefly in butter so they stay tender and juicy.
Butter
Carries the curry flavour and gives the oysters a rich, fatty coating.
Curry powder
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the butter and oysters.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows as it is heated in the butter.

The step that matters

Stir until boiling, then serve promptly. Oysters are delicate and overcook quickly; boiling them for too long toughens the flesh and makes them rubbery. Taking the dish off the heat as soon as it is hot keeps them tender.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, clove, pepper, butter):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, clove, pepper, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More oyster curry recipes

Tartlets 3 See all 28 →

You might also like

Mock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes