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Sauce

Common Oyster Sauce

A sauce made from oysters, melted butter, and optional cayenne pepper and anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Oyster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and 8,184 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Common Oyster Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Prepare and plump the oysters by removing their gills.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain the oyster liquor and add it to the melted butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir the mixture until it boils.

  3. Add the oysters and heat them through.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce immediately, adding cayenne and essence of anchovies if desired.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together8,184 recipes

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

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Oyster + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together7,663 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 flavour and texture of the sauce, and are the dish itself.
Melted butter
Gives the sauce its rich body and fat, carrying the oyster flavour.
Oyster liquor
Adds concentrated briny oyster flavour to the butter base.

The step that matters

Heating the oysters through. Oysters are delicate and overcook quickly; once they are hot through, extra heat toughens their texture and makes them rubbery, so they should be added late and heated only until warmed.

“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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