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Veal Cutlets, or Collops, a LA Française

Veal cutlets seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and curry, fried in butter and served with a lemon‑cayenne sauce.

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 ↓

Veal Cutlets, or Collops, a LA Française

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the veal into small, thin, round pieces of equal size.

  2. Sprinkle the veal with salt, white pepper, and grated nutmeg.

  3. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat and pour it 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 veal to a hot dish and serve with a sauce made from the pan drippings, 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 main body of the dish, cooked quickly to stay tender and lightly browned.
Bread crumbs
Adds coating texture and helps the surface brown when fried.
Butter
Carries flavor and helps the veal brown in the pan.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the pan sauce made from the drippings.

The step that matters

Frying the veal over medium heat. Thin pieces cook fast, so frying too long or too hot dries the meat and burns the coating before it is tender. Watching for a light golden color keeps the cutlets juicy.

Swap the white pepper

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