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Savory Minced Collops

Savory Minced Collops are a stew of minced steak cooked with butter, flour, tomato ketchup, and boiling water, served hot with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Savory Minced Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a stew pan, melt the butter and add the flour until it turns light brown.

  2. Stir in the minced meat and add nearly ½ pint of boiling water.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and tomato ketchup.

Stew and serve

  1. Stew together for 10 to 12 minutes.

  2. Serve very hot with strips of toast.

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. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Round steak
Forms the main body of the dish, providing the meaty texture once minced and stewed.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and cooks the flour into a smooth base.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as it cooks in the butter, giving the sauce body.
Tomato ketchup
Adds sweetness, acidity and a deeper colour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the butter. Cooking flour in fat until light brown removes its raw taste and helps it thicken smoothly when liquid is added. Stop before it darkens too far, since burnt flour turns bitter and can spoil the sauce.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, ketchup, 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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