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Sauce

Oyster Sauce for Beef Steaks

A savory sauce made from oysters, Indian soy, ketchup, cullis, butter, and seasonings, used to flavor beef steaks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Oyster Sauce for Beef Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Blanch the oysters and reserve their liquor.

  2. Wash and remove gills from the oysters.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stew pan, combine the reserved liquor, Indian soy, ketchup, cullis, and butter.

  2. Heat over medium until nearly boiling, then thicken with a mixture of flour and water.

  3. Season with cayenne pepper, coarse sea salt, and lemon juice to taste.

Finish

  1. Strain the sauce over the oysters and gently stew for five minutes.

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

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

  3. Oyster + ketchuptop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together318 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Provide the main flavor and tender texture of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
India soy
Adds salty, savory depth that rounds out the sauce.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and tang, balancing the salty and savory notes.

The step that matters

Gently stew the oysters after straining the sauce over them. Oysters are protein-rich and toughen and shrink when boiled hard or cooked too long. A gentle simmer for a short time keeps them tender while letting their flavor enter the sauce.

“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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