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Scotch Collops

A veal dish with bacon, butter, flour, lemon, and spices, simmered in stock and served with a lemon‑flavored 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 ↓

Scotch Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut the veal into slices ½ inch thick and trim into oval or round pieces, 2-3 inches in size.

  2. Score the pieces on both sides with a sharp knife.

  3. Sprinkle the pieces with salt, pepper, and mace or nutmeg.

Make the stock

  1. In a stewpan, combine any bones and trimmings with the onion, lemon rind, a little mace or nutmeg, and a seasoning of salt and pepper.

  2. Cover the mixture with cold water.

  3. Simmer gently for about 1 hour.

  4. Strain the liquid.

  5. Add stock or water to make ½ pint.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add the flour.

  3. Cook slowly until it turns nut‑brown.

  4. Add the strained stock.

  5. Stir until boiling.

  6. Season to taste.

  7. Simmer gently for about 20 minutes.

  8. Add lemon juice to the sauce.

Cook and serve

  1. Dip the collops in flour seasoned with salt and pepper.

  2. Fry the collops lightly in hot butter or fat.

  3. Drain the collops.

  4. Arrange the collops on a hot dish.

  5. Strain around the collops.

  6. Garnish with bacon.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Cold roast veal
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently in the sauce and fried briefly to brown.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and provides fat for frying the collops, adding richness and browning.
Flour
Cooked in butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Onion
Adds savoury aromatic flavour to the stock made from bones and trimmings.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the flour until nut-brown. Cooking the butter and flour roux until nut-brown develops a toasted, nutty flavour and colour. Undercooked roux tastes raw and pale, while over-browned roux turns bitter.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, lemon, onion, 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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