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Scotch Collops

Veal collops cooked in a sauce of gravy, lemon, anchovy, morels, browning, ketchup, and lemon-pickle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Anchovy and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 479 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Scotch Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut veal into pieces the size and thickness of a crown coin.

  2. Heat browned butter in a pan.

  3. Fry the veal pieces over high heat, shaking and turning them until light brown. Transfer fried veal to a pot to keep warm.

  4. Add more butter to the pan for each batch. Repeat frying until all veal is cooked.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour the gravy from the pan into a new pan, adding half a pint of gravy from bones, lemon, anchovy, morels, browning, ketchup, and lemon-pickle.

  2. Season with salt and cayenne pepper.

  3. Thicken with butter and flour.

  4. Let the sauce boil for 5-6 minutes.

  5. Add the veal and shake over the heat without boiling.

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. Anchovy + ketchuptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Ketchup + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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; frying gives it a browned, savoury surface.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the veal and enriches the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter, giving it body.
Gravy
Provides the liquid base and savoury depth of the sauce.
Morels
Adds earthy aroma and flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the veal and shake over the heat without boiling. Once the veal returns to the sauce, boiling can toughen the meat and make the sauce break or thicken unevenly. Gentle heat keeps the veal tender and the sauce smooth.

“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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