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Scotch Collops

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

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 collops

  1. Cut collops from the thick part of the leg of veal, about the size and thickness of a crown piece.

  2. Melt browned butter in a pan.

  3. Fry the collops over high heat, shaking and turning them until lightly browned.

  4. Transfer the fried collops to a pot to keep warm.

  5. Add more cold butter to the pan each time you fry a batch, repeating until all collops are cooked.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour the gravy from the collops into a pan.

  2. Add the ½ lemon, anchovy, morels, browning, ketchup, and lemon-pickle.

  3. Season with salt and cayenne pepper.

  4. Thicken the sauce with butter and flour.

  5. Let it boil for 5-6 minutes.

Finish

  1. Add the collops 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
Provides the tender meat that is the body of the dish.
Butter
Browns the collops and adds richness to the pan and sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the collops.
Morels
Add an earthy, savoury aroma to the sauce.
Anchovy
Adds deep savoury saltiness that rounds out the sauce.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Add the collops and shake over the heat without boiling. Once the collops return to the sauce, boiling can toughen the meat and make the sauce break or reduce unevenly. Gentle heat keeps the meat tender and the thickened 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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