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Stewed Oysters

Stewed oysters in a butter, flour, milk, and cream sauce with mace, lemon, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Stewed Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Blanch the oysters in their own liquor, strain them, and remove the gills.

Make the sauce

  1. Cook the flour and butter together in a pan.

  2. Add the oyster liquor, milk, mace, salt, and lemon juice to the pan.

  3. Once the flour is cooked, strain out the mace.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the cream, yolk of egg, and oysters to the mixture.

  2. Heat the oysters through and serve with toasted bread around.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

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

  5. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 and carries flavour while the flour cooks.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce once it is cooked through.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds creaminess.
Cream
Adds richness and a silkier body to the finished sauce.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce gently when heated with it.
Oysters
Provide the main flavour and tender texture of the dish.

The step that matters

Heat the oysters through. Once the egg yolk is added, the sauce can curdle or turn grainy if it boils. Heat gently so the yolk thickens smoothly and the oysters stay tender rather than tough and shrunken.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, cream, lemon, oyster, 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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