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Pickled Oysters

Pickled oysters prepared by boiling oysters, reducing vinegar mixture, and simmering together.

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 ↓

Pickled Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Put the oysters in a stew pan with their liquor and boil for 5 minutes.

  2. Strain the liquor into another stew pan.

  3. Remove the gills from the oysters.

  4. Wash the oysters.

Make the pickle

  1. Add the bay leaf, Cayenne pepper, vinegar, ketchup, mace, allspice, and lemon peel to the liquor.

  2. Boil the mixture until reduced by three-quarters.

Pickle and serve

  1. Add the oysters to the pickle and boil together for 2 minutes.

  2. Place the oysters in rows.

  3. Strain the liquor over the oysters.

  4. Garnish with slices of lemon or barberries.

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. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

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

  4. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Vinegar + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Main ingredient, cooked briefly so it firms and absorbs the pickling flavours.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that makes the liquor sharp and preserves the pickle character.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and tomato flavour to the pickling liquor.
Cayenne pepper
Adds heat to the pickle liquor.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until reduced by three-quarters. Reducing the liquor concentrates the spices, vinegar and ketchup so the pickle tastes strong enough to flavour the oysters. Stopping early leaves it thin and weak.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, pepper, vinegar, ketchup, allspice, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, pepper, vinegar, ketchup, allspice, lemon. 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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