Skip to main content
Main

Oysters

Battered oysters fried in hot fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Oyster and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,103 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Remove the gills from the oysters and set aside.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour, egg yolk, salt, and pepper. Let the batter stand for at least 1 hour.

  3. Beat the egg white until frothy and gently fold it into the batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Coat each oyster with the batter and drop them one by one into boiling fat.

  2. Fry for 30 seconds, then turn and fry for another 30 seconds.

  3. Remove with a skimmer and drain on paper for 1 minute.

  4. Serve immediately on a very hot dish.

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

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

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oyster + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,663 recipes

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

  5. Oyster + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,582 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Oysters
Are the main food being coated and fried, so they set the dish's core flavour and texture.
Flour
Forms the batter that coats the oysters and crisps up when fried.
Egg white
Whipped into foam and folded in, it makes the batter lighter and crisper.
Egg yolk
Enriches the batter, adding richness and helping it cling to the oysters.

The step that matters

Drop the oysters into boiling fat. The fat must be very hot so the batter sets quickly into a crisp coating. If the fat is too cool, the batter absorbs oil and becomes greasy, and the oyster overcooks before the coating browns.

“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 fried oysters recipes

Mock 7Breaded 4Philadelphia 3 See all 440 →

You might also like

Mock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes