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Real White Scots or Scotch Collops

A veal dish seasoned with pepper, salt, spices, bread, eggs, herbs, anchovies, butter, flour, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Real White Scots or Scotch Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut the veal into thin slices and beat them with a rolling pin.

  2. Season the slices with pepper, coarse sea salt, cloves, mace, lemon peel, and grated bread, then dip them in beaten eggs.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the knuckle with a bunch of sweet herbs, two anchovies, cloves, mace, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Strain the stew and thicken it with butter worked into flour, boiling it two or three times.

  3. Add the yolks of three beaten eggs and a glass of white wine before serving.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  5. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 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, becoming tender when sliced thin and beaten.
Grated bread
Coats the slices, adding a light crust that helps them brown when cooked.
Eggs
Bind the coating to the veal and, as yolks, enrich and thicken the sauce.
Butter
Worked with flour to make a roux that thickens the stew into a smooth sauce.
Flour
Combined with butter to form a roux that thickens the strained stew.
White wine
Adds acidity and brightness that lift the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if the sauce boils after they go in, leaving it grainy. Add them off the heat or at a low simmer, stirring constantly.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, clove, lemon, bread, egg, butter. 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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