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Omelette Fourree Aux Indtrcs

An omelette stuffed with oysters, butter, flour, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Omelette Fourree Aux Indtrcs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Open the oysters carefully, saving all their liquid.

  2. Put the oyster liquid and oysters in a small saucepan.

  3. Cut the oysters in halves.

  4. Warm the oysters in a bain-marie.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix butter and flour to make a smooth roux.

  2. Moisten the roux with the oyster liquid.

  3. Add milk to make ½ pint.

  4. Stir over heat until boiling.

  5. Add ½ ounce of butter and let it melt off the heat.

Make and serve the omelette

  1. Make an omelette with 6 eggs.

  2. Spread the oyster mixture over the omelette.

  3. Fold the omelette.

  4. Serve.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

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

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Sauce oysters
Provide the main filling and the briny oyster flavour of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the butter and liquid into a smooth sauce as a roux.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and flavour, and helps the roux form smoothly.
Eggs
Set when cooked to form the omelette that holds the oyster filling.
Oyster liquid
Adds savoury oyster flavour and liquid to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce until it boils. Flour thickens only when the starch in the roux is heated to boiling in the liquid. Stopping early leaves a thin sauce, while over-stirring a hot roux can make it lumpy or greasy.

“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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