Skip to main content
Main

Mutton Collops

Thin slices of mutton cooked with pepper, salt, mace, herbs, shallot, butter, flour, gravy, and lemon juice.

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

Mutton Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fry

  1. Sprinkle mutton slices with pepper, salt, mace, herbs, and shallot.

  2. Fry the slices in butter until browned.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir in flour and cook for a minute.

  2. Add gravy and lemon juice, then simmer gently for 5-7 minutes.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Mutton
Provides the meat that is browned and then gently simmered until tender in the sauce.
Butter
Fat for frying the slices, promoting browning and a rich flavour.
Flour
Thickens the gravy into a light sauce as it cooks briefly with the butter.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the slices simmer in.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich mutton and gravy.

The step that matters

Frying the slices until browned. Browning in hot butter creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Overcrowding or too little heat steams the meat grey instead, leaving a flat taste before the sauce is added.

Swap the mace

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

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

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

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipes