Skip to main content
Main

Yeal Cutlets, or Collops, a LA Fran^aise

Veal cutlets or collops sautéed with butter and served with Espagnole sauce or lemon‑cayenne gravy.

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

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 ↓

Yeal Cutlets, or Collops, a LA Fran^aise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut the veal into small, thin, round pieces of equal size.

  2. Sprinkle salt, white pepper, and grated nutmeg on the veal.

  3. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat and pour it over the meat.

  4. Set the pan aside until ready to cook.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry the collops over medium heat for 4 to 5 minutes until lightly browned.

  2. Transfer the collops to a hot dish.

  3. Serve with Espagnole sauce or a quick gravy flavored with lemon juice and cayenne.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. White pepper + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to a tender, lightly browned texture when cut thin.
Bread crumbs
Listed in the ingredients but not used in the method; no role assigned.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the meat brown lightly in the pan.

The step that matters

Frying the collops over medium heat. Thin, equal-sized pieces cook quickly, so frying too long or too hot can dry the veal and over-brown it. Watching for light browning keeps the meat tender and juicy.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, bread, butter, nutmeg, 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes