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Oysters a LA Mode

A dish of diced oysters simmered in cream and lemon juice, served with a mushroom sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Oysters a LA Mode

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the oysters

  1. Simmer the diced oysters in a pan with the cream and lemon juice for 3 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In another pan, fry the diced mushrooms in butter dusted with flour.

  2. Moisten the mushrooms with oyster liquor and consomme, then add cream and let it reduce.

  3. Add a small bit of butter and season with salt and cayenne pepper.

Assemble

  1. Combine the oysters with the sauce and fill the patties.

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

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

Butter and flour 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 flavour and the tender, briny filling.
Cream
Adds richness and body, and thickens the sauce as it reduces.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and carries the flour to form the thickening base.
Flour
Thickens the butter and sauce so the filling holds together.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and oysters.
Oyster liquor
Adds concentrated oyster flavour and salinity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the oysters for only 3 minutes. Oysters firm up and shrink quickly when heated. Overcooking squeezes out moisture and makes them rubbery, so a short, gentle simmer keeps them tender.

“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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