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Scotch Collops

A stew of finely chopped buttock steak cooked with butter, onion, flour, stock, and seasonings, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Scotch Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the meat finely.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  3. Fry the onion slightly until soft.

Cook

  1. Add the meat and stir over high heat until browned.

  2. Sprinkle in the flour and stir for a few minutes.

  3. Add the stock and stir until boiling.

  4. Simmer gently for 45 minutes.

  5. Season with pepper and salt, then add the parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot dish, garnished with triangles of fried bread.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 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

Buttock steak
Provides the main body of the dish; finely chopped meat becomes tender during gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light gravy once it is stirred into the juices and boiled.
Butter
Carries the onion and meat in the pan and adds richness to the finished gravy.
Onion
Softens and adds sweetness and savoury depth to the gravy base.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 45 minutes. Gentle heat lets the connective tissue in the meat break down slowly, so it turns tender rather than tough. Boiling hard toughens the proteins and can make the gravy catch on the pan.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, flour, pepper):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, flour, 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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