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Oyster-Sauce, for Boiled Turkey, Fish, &C.

A sauce made from oysters, melted butter, cream, salt, pepper, and lemon juice, used for boiled turkey and fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Oyster-Sauce, for Boiled Turkey, Fish, &C.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Open the oysters just before making the sauce and save their liquor.

  2. Strain the liquor.

  3. Scald the oysters in the strained liquor.

  4. Drain the oysters on a sieve.

  5. Let the liquor settle.

  6. Pour off the sediment into melted butter.

  7. Pick and remove the gills from the oysters one by one.

Make the sauce

  1. Add enough cream to the butter to make it look white and nice.

  2. In a stewpan, combine the oysters with the melted butter.

  3. Strain the liquor over the oysters.

  4. Let the oysters come to a boil.

  5. Set the stewpan by the side of the fire to tenderize the oysters.

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

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

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

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

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Oyster + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Provide the main flavour and tender texture of the sauce once gently heated.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the sauce.
Cream
Lightens the colour of the sauce and softens its flavour and texture.

The step that matters

Let the oysters come to a boil. Oysters turn rubbery and shrink when boiled hard. Once the stewpan is at a boil, moving it off the heat to sit at the side of the fire lets them cook gently and stay tender.

“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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