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Scotch Collops

Slices of fillet cooked in butter, simmered in broth, then served with sauce of lemon, catsup, mace, pepper, salt, and browned flour, garnished with bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Scotch Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Flour the slices of fillet.

  2. Brown the fillet slices in fresh butter in a frying pan.

Simmer and season

  1. Simmer gently in weak broth or boiling water until nearly done.

  2. Add lemon juice, catsup, mace, pepper, and salt.

Thicken and serve

  1. Remove the collops and keep them hot in a dish.

  2. Thicken the sauce with browned flour and pour it over the collops.

  3. Garnish with curled slices of bacon.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Fillet
Provides the tender meat that is sliced, browned and gently simmered.
Flour
Coats the slices so they brown, and the browned flour thickens the sauce.
Fresh butter
Fat for browning the fillet slices, adding richness and color.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the meat.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until nearly done. Gentle simmering keeps the thin fillet slices tender and moist; boiling hard toughens meat proteins and tightens fibers, making them dry and chewy.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

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