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Oysters, Stewed

A creamy oyster stew made with butter, flour, milk, cream, egg yolk, mace, lemon juice, and seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Oysters, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Blanch the oysters in their own liquor, then strain and add enough milk to make 1 pint.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, add the mace, strained liquor, and milk, and boil for a few minutes.

  2. Beat the cream and egg yolk together, strain into the sauce, and stir over low heat for a few minutes without boiling.

  3. Remove the gills from the oysters, cut them into halves or quarters, and stir them into the sauce.

Finish and serve

  1. Season to taste, add the lemon juice, remove the mace, and serve immediately.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provide the main flavour and tender texture of the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquor and milk into a smooth, stable sauce.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce gently when stirred over low heat.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk and cream. Egg yolk thickens through gentle heat and can curdle or scramble if it boils. Keeping the sauce over low heat and below boiling gives a smooth, thickened result.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, butter, flour, egg, milk, cream, lemon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, butter, flour, egg, milk, cream, lemon. 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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