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Mutton - Collops

Thin slices of mutton cooked with butter, flour, gravy, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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

  1. Cut thin slices from a leg or chump end of mutton.

  2. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, pounded mace, minced savory herbs, and minced shallots.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry in butter until browned.

  2. Stir in flour, then add gravy and lemon juice.

  3. Simmer gently for 5 to 7 minutes and 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 simmered into the dish.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the meat and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the slices.
Shallots
Add mild sweetness and aromatic flavour to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and meat.

The step that matters

Frying the slices until browned. Browning creates flavourful Maillard compounds on the meat surface. Pale, under-fried slices produce a flat-tasting dish once simmered in gravy.

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.

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