Skip to main content
Main

Scalloped Oysters

Scalloped oysters are baked oysters topped with butter, breadcrumbs, and oyster liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Scalloped Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the oysters

  1. Stew the oysters slowly in their own liquor for 2–3 minutes.

  2. Remove the oysters with a spoon, discard the gills, and skim the liquor.

Make the crumb base

  1. Melt the butter in a stew pan. Add enough bread crumbs to absorb the butter.

  2. Add the oyster liquor to the bread crumbs and bring to a boil.

Assemble and bake

  1. Butter the scallop shells.

  2. Layer the shells with oysters, then bread crumbs, and repeat the layers. Moisten the layers with oyster liquor, cover with bread crumbs, and dot with butter.

  3. Brown in a Dutch oven until golden.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Oyster + anchovytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Bread + anchovytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

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

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, briny body of the dish.
Butter
Coats the crumbs and adds richness and golden browning on top.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the liquor and butter to form a soft, moist layered structure.
Oyster liquor
Moistens the crumbs and carries the briny seafood flavour through the layers.

The step that matters

Browning the top until golden. Browning relies on heat and the Maillard reaction between the buttered crumbs and the surface. Stopping too early leaves it pale and soft, while too long dries the layers out.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes