Home › The Principles of Cookery › Collops, Scotch, White
Collops, Scotch, White
Prepare the veal as in the last recipe. Fry it in bacon-fat if it can be had, if not, in butter, lard, or good dripping. When lightly browned, put it into a stewpan, cover it with good veal stock, thicken this with a lump of butter rolled in flour, and add a cupful of cream and a glass of sherry. Simmer gently for twenty minutes in the gravy. Place the meat on a hot dish, and pour the gravy over it. Time, five minutes to try the collops. Sufficient, two pounds for five persons. Probable cost, 10d., exclusive of the cold meat.
A Victorian veal escalope in a sherry-and-cream gravy. The one thing to watch is the twenty-minute simmer, which suited the tougher, thicker cuts of the period far better than it suits modern veal.
- What a collop isA collop is a thin slice of meat, here veal, trimmed and beaten out. The recipe leans on "the last recipe" for the preparation, which is not reproduced here; slice thinly, season, and pat dry before frying.
- "White" collopsThe white version is meant to stay pale, in contrast to brown Scotch collops which are floured and coloured hard. Take the meat only to the point where it sets and turns opaque with the faintest gold; a dark crust puts the dish in the wrong category.
- The simmering timeTwenty minutes will render thin modern veal grey and stringy. Bring the thickened stock to a bare tremble, slip the collops in, and give them five to eight minutes at most, or build the sauce first and return the meat only to warm through.
- "Try" the collopsAlmost certainly a misprint or slip for "fry". The five minutes refers to the initial browning in the pan, not the stewing.
- A glass of sherryA wineglass in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz, so roughly a quarter cup. A dry amontillado or fino suits the sauce better than a sweet cream sherry.
- A cupful of creamCassell's cup is not a standardised measure. Start with half a cup of double or heavy cream and add more once you see how the sauce has reduced.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: work equal weights of soft butter and plain flour to a paste and whisk it into the simmering stock in small pieces. Roughly a tablespoon of each will thicken a pint.
- Bacon fat and drippingBacon fat gives the dish its backbone of flavour; if you use butter instead, clarified butter will take the heat better than whole butter, which browns and speckles the pale sauce.
- Yield and the cost noteTwo pounds of veal for five is generous by modern serving sizes and will stretch to six.
"Collop" is an old word for a slice of meat, in English use since the fourteenth century and of obscure origin; in Scotland and northern England the Monday before Shrove Tuesday was long known as Collop Monday, when the last of the household's meat was eaten before the fast. Scotch collops appear in British cookery books from the seventeenth century onward, in two branches: brown, floured and darkly fried with onion, and white, kept pale and finished with cream and wine, which is the version here. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century the white form was made with sherry, beurre manié. The costing in pence, and the instruction to use dripping if bacon fat cannot be had, are characteristic of the book's address to middle-class households running on a fixed weekly allowance.