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Bechamel Sauce with Oysters

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, cream, egg yolks, and oysters, seasoned with bay leaf, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce with Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the bechamel

  1. Heat the butter and flour together in a saucepan.

  2. Add the soup stock, bay leaf, salt, pepper, and half of the cream to the saucepan.

  3. Cook gently for 20 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture into another saucepan.

  5. Place the saucepan over low heat.

  6. Add the beaten egg yolks and the remaining cream.

  7. Bring to a boil while stirring continuously. Let it boil for one minute.

Prepare the oysters

  1. Remove shell pieces from the oysters and place them in a stew-pan.

  2. Heat the oysters over low heat until they reach boiling point.

  3. Skim and strain the oysters.

Combine

  1. Add the prepared oysters to the Bechamel sauce.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  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 roux with fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rich base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as a roux with butter, giving it body.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce when gently heated, adding richness and body.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Oysters
Provide the main briny flavour and texture of the sauce.
Soup stock or bouillon
Supplies the savoury liquid base that the sauce is built on.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by coagulating with gentle heat. If the mixture is too hot when they go in, or boils too hard, they can scramble and curdle. Keep the heat low and stir constantly while the yolks thicken the sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, butter, flour, carrot, parsley, cream, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, butter, flour, carrot, parsley, cream, egg. 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.

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