Skip to main content
Main

Oysters Sautes

Sautéed oysters cooked in butter, seasoned with pepper and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Oyster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,184 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Oysters Sautes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Drain the juice from the oysters thoroughly.

  2. Butter a chafing dish well.

  3. Heat the chafing dish until very hot.

Cook the oysters

  1. Place the oysters in a single layer in the chafing dish.

  2. Brown one side of the oysters.

  3. Turn the oysters to brown the other side.

  4. While cooking, add a little butter to combine with the oyster juice.

  5. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Serve the oysters and the brown skin very hot.

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

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

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Oyster + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,663 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Form the main substance of the dish and brown on the surface while cooking.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the oysters and combines with their juice into a rich sauce.

The step that matters

Drain the oysters thoroughly. Excess liquid on the oysters would steam them in the hot dish instead of letting the surface brown. Dry oysters brown better and keep their texture.

“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.

You might also like

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