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Collops

Collops are sliced meat simmered in a sauce of stock, lemon, anchovy, morels, browning, catsup, lemon-pickle, salt, cayenne, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Brown the collops in a pan.

  2. Pour the cooking liquid into a stewpan.

  3. Add stock, lemon juice, anchovy, morels, browning, catsup, and lemon-pickle.

  4. Season with salt and cayenne pepper.

  5. Thicken the sauce with butter and flour, and boil for 5-6 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the collops and gently shake over heat without boiling.

  2. Remove collops and place them on a dish.

  3. Strain the sauce and pour it hot over the collops.

  4. Top with force-meat balls and curled bacon slices.

  5. Add a few mushrooms and garnish with lemon.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together335 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

Collops
The sliced meat forms the body of the dish, browned first for flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with butter so it coats the collops.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, forms the base that thickens it.
Morels
Add earthy, savoury aroma to the sauce.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth and salty umami to the sauce.
Lemon-pickle
Adds sharp acidity and tang to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with butter and flour, and boil for 5-6 minutes. Flour must be cooked through in the fat and liquid to remove its raw taste and to thicken fully. Boiling it properly activates the starch so the sauce coats the meat without lumps or a floury flavour.

“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.

More collops recipes

Scotch 74Veal 47Minced 35Beef 31Mutton 25Minced Beef 9 See all 4 →

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