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Oyster Cocktails

A chilled oyster dish served with a tomato-based sauce and garnished with watercress or chicory.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Oyster Cocktails

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the tomato catsup, Worcestershire sauce, horseradish, Tabasco, salt, black pepper, lemon juice, onion juice, mushroom catsup, and walnut catsup until well combined.

Combine and serve

  1. Drain the oysters and add a little of their liquor to the catsup mixture.

  2. Gently fold in the oysters until coated.

  3. Serve the oysters on round slices of buttered steamed brown bread, garnished with watercress or chicory.

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. Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Horseradish + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together259 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomato catsup
Forms the sweet, tangy base that the sauce and oysters are coated in.
Olympia oysters
Provide the main ingredient, with their briny flavor carried by the sauce.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savory depth and a salty, fermented note to the sauce.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that cuts through the richness of the oysters.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the sweetness of the catsup.
Steamed brown bread
Serves as a soft base that holds the oysters and absorbs some of the sauce.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, sauce, horseradish, pepper, lemon, onion, mushroom):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sauce, horseradish, pepper, lemon, onion, mushroom. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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