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Veal Cutlets, or Collops.

Thin veal cutlets seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and curry, fried in butter, served with gravy or lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

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

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

  3. Melt the butter in a saucepan and pour it over the veal.

  4. Set aside until ready to cook.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry the veal over medium heat until lightly browned, about 4 to 5 minutes.

  2. Serve with curry sauce or gravy, adding lemon juice and cayenne if desired.

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
Provides the main protein, which firms and browns when fried in butter.
Bread-crumbs
Adds a light coating that helps the cutlets brown and gives a crisp surface.
Butter
Carries heat and flavor and promotes browning in the pan.
Curry powder
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the sauce or gravy served with the veal.

The step that matters

Frying the veal over medium heat. Veal pieces are thin and lean, so heat that is too high scorches the outside before the inside cooks through, while too low prevents browning. Medium heat lets the surface brown gradually as the proteins react.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, bread, nutmeg, butter, 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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