Skip to main content
Main

Oyster Vol-au-vent

A vol-au-vent filled with oysters in a spiced cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Vol-au-vent

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the gills from the oysters and reserve their liquor in a saucepan.

  2. Add mace, cayenne, lemon juice, lemon peel, and black pepper to the liquor. Boil for 15-20 minutes.

  3. Knead the butter with the flour and stir it into the mixture. Boil until thick.

  4. Strain the mixture.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the oysters. Simmer for 6 minutes.

  2. Stir in the cream.

  3. Serve the vol-au-vent on a neatly-folded napkin.

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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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 flavour and tender, briny body of the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Baked flour
Thickens the liquor into a sauce as it boils.
Fresh cream
Adds richness and softens the sauce into a smooth, creamy finish.

The step that matters

Boil until thick. The butter and flour must cook long enough for the flour to swell and thicken the liquor. Stopping early leaves a thin sauce, while boiling too long can make it pasty and heavy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, pepper, lemon, butter, flour, cream):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, pepper, lemon, butter, flour, cream. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes