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Sauce

Oyster Ketchup

A sauce made by simmering oysters, anchovies, lemon rind, lemon juice, and white wine, then straining the solids.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and white wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,832 recipes. Both carry myrcene, which smells balsamic, herbaceous. The science ↓

Oyster Ketchup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Remove the liquor from the oyster shells and pound the oysters in a mortar.

Simmer and strain

  1. Combine the pounded oysters and their liquor in a stewpan with anchovies, lemon rind, lemon juice, and white wine.

  2. Cover the pan and simmer gently for 1 hour.

  3. Strain the mixture to separate the solids from the liquid.

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. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  2. Oyster + white winetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together518 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Oyster + lemontop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,942 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 savoury flavour and body of the ketchup.
Anchovies
Add deep savoury flavour that rounds out the oyster taste.
White wine
Adds acidity and helps extract flavour during the long simmer.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the savoury notes.

The step that matters

Simmering gently with the lid on. A gentle simmer extracts flavour from the oysters and anchovies without toughening the oyster flesh. Boiling hard can make the oysters rubbery and cloud the liquid.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, white wine):

  1. Grapefits about as well
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, white wine. 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.

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