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Fricasseed Oysters

Fricasseed Oysters are oysters cooked in a sauce of oyster liquor, flour, butter, cream, and optional eggs and lemon, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fricasseed Oysters

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oysters

  1. Drain the liquor from the oysters and strain 1 pint into a saucepan.

  2. Bring the liquor to a boil and add the oysters; cook until they swell.

Make the fricassee

  1. Mix the flour with the butter until smooth, then add to the oysters.

  2. Cook until the oysters are white and plump, then add cream, salt, and white pepper.

  3. If desired, add beaten eggs and lemon juice, and sprinkle with parsley before serving.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, 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
Are the main ingredient, cooked briefly until they swell and turn plump and white.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquor into a smooth, creamy sauce once mixed with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and blends with the flour to help thicken the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Beaten eggs
Optionally enrich and further thicken the sauce when gently heated.

The step that matters

Cook the oysters until they just swell and turn white. Oysters toughen and shrink quickly when overcooked, so they should be removed from heat as soon as they plump and turn white.

“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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