Skip to main content
Main

Angels on Horseback

Bacon-wrapped oysters served on gluten biscuits, garnished with watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Biscuit and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Angels on Horseback

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Blanch the oysters and remove the gills.

  2. Wrap each oyster in a slice of bacon and season with lemon juice and cayenne.

  3. Place each bacon-wrapped oyster on a slice of gluten biscuit.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in the oven at 400°F (200°C) until the bacon is cooked.

  2. Serve on a hot dish garnished with watercress.

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. Biscuit + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Form the main filling, cooking gently to become tender and juicy inside the bacon.
Bacon
Wraps the oysters, adding fat and salty flavour while it crisps and browns in the oven.
Gluten biscuit
Serves as a base under each oyster, holding it and soaking up rendered juices.

The step that matters

Baking until the bacon is cooked. Bacon must render its fat and turn crisp while the oyster stays tender. Overbaking toughens the oyster and dries the bacon, so watch for crisp bacon and a just-firm oyster.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, pepper, biscuit, watercress):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, pepper, biscuit, watercress. 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.

More bacon-wrapped oysters recipes

on Toast 5 See all 61 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesPotato BiscuitPotato Biscuit32 recipesMock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipes