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Beef Collops

Thin slices of beef cooked in butter and gravy with shallot, walnut, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 440 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Cut the steak into thin pieces about 3 inches long.

  2. Beat the pieces with the blade of a knife and dredge with flour.

Fry and simmer

  1. Heat butter in a frying pan and fry the steak for about 3 minutes.

  2. Transfer the steak to a small saucepan and pour the gravy over it.

  3. Add a piece of butter kneaded with a little flour, along with the shallot, walnut, cayenne pepper, and seasoning.

  4. Let the mixture simmer gently for 10 minutes without boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve in a hot dish.

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. Shallot + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + shallottop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rump steak
Provides the meat that is the main body of the dish, tenderised by beating and cut into thin pieces.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for frying, and with flour helps thicken the sauce.
Flour (in the method)
Coats the steak and, kneaded into butter, thickens the gravy sauce.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the meat simmers in.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without boiling. Boiling toughens meat proteins and can break up the butter-flour thickening, so the mixture should only simmer gently for the stated 10 minutes.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Lettucefits about as well
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, walnut. 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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