Name: Oyster Pates
Ingredients: rich pastry (for tarts); 2-3 oysters per paté; rich cream

Why it works: Oyster and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,886 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Oyster Pates

Ingredients

rich pastry (for tarts)
2-3 oysters per paté
rich cream

Directions

Prepare

Prepare a rich pastry as you would for tarts.

Assemble and cook

Place 2-3 oysters in each pastry shell.
Stew the oysters in rich cream.
Cover with a round of pastry.

Serve

Serve while hot.

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.

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

Rich pastry: Forms the shell and top crust that hold the oysters and cream together.
Oysters: Provide the main filling, adding briny, savoury flavour to the pâté.
Rich cream: Stews with the oysters to make a moist, richly textured filling.

“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.