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Oysters on Toast

Oysters served on buttered toast with a creamy sauce of butter, cream, lemon, flour, and egg.

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

Oysters on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare enough buttered toast to fill a platter.

Cook the oysters

  1. Cook the can of oysters in their liquid, seasoning with butter, salt, and pepper.

  2. Pour the cooked oysters over the toast.

  3. Scald a dozen oysters in their own liquor or a little well-salted water, then skim them out.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter, add ½ cup of cream, lemon juice, and 1 teaspoon of flour.

  2. Heat the mixture, then add the beaten egg and stir until thickened.

  3. Pour the sauce over the oysters in a hot dish.

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. Butter + creamtop 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. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 savory flavor and the tender, briny body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded, savory flavor to the oysters and sauce.
Cream
Gives the sauce body and a smooth, rich texture.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling with heat to give it body.
Beaten egg
Sets into the sauce as it heats, thickening and enriching it.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and butter sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg to the sauce. Egg proteins thicken the sauce as they heat, but if the mixture gets too hot or boils after the egg goes in, the egg can curdle and turn grainy. Stir steadily over gentle heat until it just thickens.

“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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