Skip to main content
Main

Real White Scots or Scotch Collops

A veal dish seasoned with pepper, salt, cloves, mace, lemon peel, bread, eggs, sweet herbs, anchovies, butter, flour, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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, salt, cloves, mace, lemon peel, and bread after dipping them in beaten eggs.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the knuckle with sweet herbs, anchovies, cloves, mace, pepper, and salt.

  2. Strain the stew and thicken it with butter mixed with flour.

  3. Bring to a boil two or three times, then add the yolks of three beaten eggs and a glass of white wine.

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 meat, which is thinned and tenderised by beating before cooking.
Butter
Combines with flour to thicken the stew into a rich, smooth sauce.
Flour
Thickens the strained stew when cooked with butter.
Eggs
Coat the veal slices and, as yolks, enrich and thicken the finished sauce.
White wine
Adds acidity and flavour to the finished sauce.
Bread
Adds body to the seasoning coating on the veal slices.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Once the sauce is boiling, adding beaten yolks can scramble them if the sauce is too hot. Boiling them repeatedly first also affects the texture. Keeping the sauce just below boiling when the yolks go in lets them thicken it smoothly.

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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes