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Scotch Collops White

Veal collops cooked in a white sauce of butter, lemon pickle, mushroom ketchup, caper liquor, mace, cayenne, salt, flour, egg yolks, and cream.

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 White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut collops from the thick part of the leg of veal, the size and thickness of a crown piece.

Fry the collops

  1. Melt a lump of butter in a pan over low heat to avoid discoloration.

  2. Add the collops to the pan before it gets hot, turning them until the butter turns into a thick white gravy.

  3. Transfer the collops and gravy to a pot to keep warm.

  4. Add more cold butter to the pan each time you fill it and continue frying the collops until finished.

Make the gravy

  1. Pour the gravy from the collops into the pan, adding lemon pickle, mushroom ketchup, caper liquor, beaten mace, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  2. Thicken the mixture with flour and butter, boiling for five minutes.

  3. Stir in the beaten egg yolks and cream, shaking the pan over the fire until the gravy thickens.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the collops back to the pan and heat them through before serving.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Ketchup + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Veal
Forms the main meat that is cut into collops and cooked through in the butter.
Butter
Fries the collops and, with flour, forms the thick white gravy base.
Flour
Thickens the gravy together with butter as it boils.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the gravy when stirred in with the cream.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the finished gravy.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury depth and umami to the gravy.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks and cream over the heat. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat, but if the gravy boils hard after they go in, they can scramble and curdle, so shaking the pan over the fire keeps it smooth while it thickens.

Swap the mace

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

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

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