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Veal Cutlets, or Collops.

Veal cutlets seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, curry, and butter, then fried and served with gravy or curry sauce.

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 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. 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
Forms the main protein, cooking quickly to a tender, lightly browned cutlet when cut thin.
Bread-crumbs
Adds structure and a crisp, golden coating on the outside of the cutlets.
Butter
Carries flavour and promotes browning when the veal is fried.
Curry powder
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour to the coating and sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the veal over medium heat. Thin veal cooks fast, so it can dry out or over-brown quickly. Medium heat lets it brown lightly and cook through gently while staying moist.

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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