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Beef Collops

Thin slices of beef cooked with gravy, butter, shallots, walnuts, pickled cucumbers, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 405 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut beef into 3‑inch pieces.

  2. Beat pieces with a knife and flour them.

Cook and finish

  1. Fry the collops in butter for 2 minutes.

  2. Transfer to a small stew‑pan and cover with gravy.

  3. Add butter rubbed in flour, pepper, salt, shallot, walnut, pickled cucumbers, and capers.

  4. Ensure it does not boil and serve in a hot covered 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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Shallot + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the meat that is tenderised by beating and gently simmered in the sauce.
Flour
Coats the beef and, with rubbed-in butter, thickens the gravy into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and helps brown the collops when they are fried.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the dish that keeps the beef moist as it cooks.
Pickled cucumbers
Add a sharp, acidic note that balances the richness of the sauce.
Capers
Add a sharp, salty acidity that brightens the sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the sauce from boiling. Boiling a sauce thickened with flour and butter can make it grainy or cause the thickening to break, and it can toughen the meat. Holding it just below a boil keeps the beef tender and the sauce smooth.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, butter, pepper, shallot, cucumber, capers):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, butter, pepper, shallot, cucumber, capers. 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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