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Fricasseed Oysters

A savory oyster dish cooked in a butter and flour sauce with egg yolks and spices.

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 ↓

Fricasseed Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the oysters

  1. Place the oysters in a pot with their liquor over medium heat.

  2. Once they begin to boil, transfer them to a colander to drain the liquor into a hot dish.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat until it bubbles.

  2. Sprinkle in the flour and stir until it cooks, then let it cool slightly.

  3. Whisk in the oyster liquor and remove from heat.

  4. Mix in the beaten egg yolks, salt, red pepper, lemon juice, and nutmeg.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 ingredient and tender, briny flavor that the sauce carries.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Cooked with the butter, it thickens the sauce by swelling as it heats.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce as they set gently from the residual heat.

The step that matters

Mixing in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks scramble if they meet high heat directly, so the sauce must be off the heat before they go in, letting them thicken it gently and smoothly.

“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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