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Mince Collops

Mince Collops is a dish of minced beef cooked with butter, flour, and stock, served with toast and optional poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Mince Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the collops

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  3. Add the stock and raw chopped beef, cooking until the meat turns grey, stirring constantly.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Serve with toast around the dish and poached eggs on top 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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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 + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce that coats the beef.
Raw chopped beef
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking until it turns grey.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour into the pan.
Stock
Provides the liquid base that the flour thickens into a sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and stock while cooking the beef. Flour clumps if left unstirred in hot fat, and beef left still can stick and brown unevenly. Constant stirring keeps the sauce smooth and the meat cooking evenly as it turns grey.

“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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