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Creamed Oysters

Creamed oysters are oysters cooked in a thickened cream or milk sauce, seasoned with pepper, sea salt, and butter, served hot over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Creamed Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the creamed oysters

  1. Thicken the cream or milk with a little flour in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the oysters along with their liquor to the thickened mixture.

  3. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and butter.

Serve

  1. Serve the creamed oysters hot over slices of browned toast.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Oyster + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 seafood flavor and tender texture that the creamed sauce carries.
Cream or sweet milk
Forms the rich, smooth base that the flour thickens into a sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cream or milk into a sauce that coats the oysters.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that rounds out the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the cream or milk with flour before adding the oysters. Flour must be cooked into the liquid over medium heat so it swells and thickens smoothly without lumps. Adding oysters to a raw, thin base leaves the sauce watery and can make the flour taste pasty.

“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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