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To Dress Scotch Collops White

Veal collops cooked in butter with lemon pickle, mushroom powder, mace, cayenne pepper, salt, egg yolks, and flour.

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

To Dress Scotch Collops White

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the veal

  1. Melt butter in a stew pan over low heat.

  2. Add the veal to the pan.

  3. Cover and cook until done.

  4. Transfer the veal and gravy to a pot to keep warm.

Finish the sauce

  1. In the same pan, fry the collops until cooked.

  2. Pour the gravy from the veal into the pan with the collops.

  3. Add lemon pickle, mushroom powder, mace, cayenne, and salt.

  4. Boil for a few minutes.

  5. Mix in beaten egg yolks and flour.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, 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

Veal
Forms the main body of the dish, and its juices contribute to the gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the veal brown and take on flavour in the pan.
Egg yolks
Thicken the gravy as they warm and add richness and a smooth texture.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the collops rather than running off.
Lemon pickle
Adds acidity and a sharp tang that balances the richness of the butter and yolks.

The step that matters

Mixing in the beaten egg yolks and flour. Egg yolks thicken a sauce as they warm but scramble if they get too hot. Stir them in gently with the pan off or on very low heat, and avoid letting the mixture boil again, so the gravy stays smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, lemon, mushroom, pepper, egg, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, lemon, mushroom, pepper, egg, flour. 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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