Skip to main content
Main

Angels on Horseback

Bacon-wrapped oysters served on fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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. Remove the rind from the bacon slices.

  2. Remove the gills from the oysters and place one on each slice of bacon.

  3. Add 2-3 drops of lemon juice and a pinch of cayenne pepper to each oyster.

  4. Roll the bacon tightly around the oyster and secure it on a skewer.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry the skewered rolls until crispy.

  2. Serve each roll on a slice of fried bread while hot.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fat bacon
Wraps the oyster and renders fat that crisps the outside as it fries.
Oysters
Provide the main savoury, briny filling that the bacon wraps around.
Bread
Fried in butter, it soaks up drippings and gives a crisp base under the roll.
Lemon juice
Adds a bright acidity that cuts the richness of the bacon and oyster.

The step that matters

Fry the skewered rolls until crispy. Bacon must render and crisp fully while the oyster stays tender. Overcooking toughens the oyster, while undercooked bacon stays flabby and greasy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More bacon-wrapped oysters recipes

on Toast 5 See all 61 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes