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Angels on Horseback

A dish of oysters wrapped in bacon, herbs, and lemon, fried and served on bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Angels on Horseback

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the bacon into small squares, just large enough to wrap around an oyster.

  2. Sprinkle the herbs and pepper over the bacon squares.

Cook and serve

  1. Place an oyster on each square, squeeze a drop of lemon juice over it, and roll it up.

  2. Skewer the rolled oysters and fry until the bacon is cooked, about 3 minutes.

  3. Serve the fried oysters on the hot rounds of bread, garnished with cut lemon and parsley.

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 + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,545 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  4. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

  5. Oyster + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked 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 central filling, cooking gently inside the wrapping of bacon.
Bacon
Wraps each oyster and renders fat that fries the bbundle, adding savory flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich bacon and briny oysters.
Bread rounds
Fried base that soaks up juices and gives a crisp, sturdy support under the oysters.

The step that matters

Fry until the bacon is cooked. Oysters cook quickly and can toughen or dry out if left too long, while bacon needs enough time to crisp and render its fat. Watching the bacon closely balances both.

“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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