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Veal Cutlets, or Collops, a LA Fran^aise

Veal cutlets or collops seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and curry, fried and served with Espagnole sauce or gravy.

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

Veal 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 the veal with coarse sea salt, white pepper, and grated nutmeg.

  3. Melt the butter in a saucepan and pour the melted butter over the veal.

  4. Set the pan aside until ready to cook.

Cook and serve

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

  2. Transfer the cutlets to a hot dish.

  3. Sauce the cutlets with Espagnole 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 tender main body of the cutlets, cooking quickly when cut thin.
Butter
Carries seasoning over the veal and adds richness and browning in the pan.
Espagnole sauce or gravy
Adds moisture and savoury depth that completes the cutlets.

The step that matters

Frying the veal over medium heat. Thin veal cooks fast, so frying over medium heat for the stated 4 to 5 minutes browns the surface without drying or toughening the meat. Too much heat scorches the butter and outside before the centre is cooked.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, bread, butter, nutmeg, sauce, 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, sauce, 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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