Name: Oyster Pie
Ingredients: Pastry for pie; Raw oysters; 2 tablespoons butter; Coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Oyster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,184 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Oyster Pie

Ingredients

Pastry for pie
Raw oysters
2 tablespoons butter
Coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Line a dish with pie pastry.
Pour raw oysters into the dish.
Add 2 tablespoons of butter.
Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

Bake

Cover with crust and bake for 30 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

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.

Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,184 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Raw oysters: Provide the main filling and their briny flavor as they cook in the pie.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, helping the filling taste rounded and moist.
Pie pastry: Forms the dish and crust that encloses the filling while it bakes.

“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.