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Oyster Kabobs

Oyster kabobs are skewered oysters and bacon, breaded and fried, served with a brown sauce made from oyster liquor.

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 Kabobs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Open the oysters, keeping the liquor, and remove the gills and hard parts.

  2. Cut the bacon into pieces the same size as the oysters.

  3. On each skewer, thread 6 oysters with a piece of bacon between each oyster and at each end.

  4. Mix the coarse sea salt with the bread crumbs.

Coat and fry

  1. Coat the kabobs in egg and then in the bread crumb mixture.

  2. Fry the kabobs in a frying basket until light brown, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, stew the gills and hard parts in their liquor for 5 minutes, then strain.

  2. Add the thick Brown Sauce, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice to the strained liquor.

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. Oyster + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

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

Native oysters
Provide the main filling, and their liquor adds briny flavor to the sauce.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor as it cooks around the oysters, keeping them moist.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating when fried.
Brown sauce
Gives the sauce body and a rich, thick texture.

The step that matters

Frying the coated kabobs until light brown. Oysters cook quickly and turn tough if overheated, so the coating should brown while the oysters stay tender and juicy inside.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, bread, sauce, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Plumfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, bread, sauce, pepper. 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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