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Collops, Veal

Veal collops simmered with stock, herbs, and lemon, thickened with roux and garnished with lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 ↓

Collops, Veal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut the veal into pieces about ½ inch thick, 1 inch wide, and 2 inches long.

  2. Season the veal with pepper, mace, lemon peel, and herbs.

  3. Brown the veal in hot dripping.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Add enough weak stock to cover the meat, skim, and simmer for 1 to 1.5 hours.

  2. Add salt and lemon juice to taste, then stir in white roux to thicken.

Serve

  1. Boil briefly and serve, garnished with sliced lemons and optional bacon rolls and croûtons.

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 + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Veal + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,761 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Mace + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 tender meat that becomes the body of the dish after long simmering.
White roux
Flour and fat cooked together, thickening the stock into a smooth, rich sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury sauce.
Weak stock
Provides the liquid that gently cooks the veal and forms the base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the veal is tender. Veal from the fillet is lean and can toughen if boiled hard. A gentle simmer over 1 to 1.5 hours breaks down connective tissue slowly, keeping the meat tender and the sauce clear.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, lemon. 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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