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Beef Collops

Beef collops are thin beef slices sautéed and simmered in gravy with butter, flour, 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 the beef into pieces three inches long and beat them with a knife.

  2. Coat the beef pieces in flour.

  3. Fry the collops in butter for two minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Transfer the collops to a small stew pan and cover with gravy.

  2. Add a bit of butter rubbed in flour, pepper, salt, finely shredded shallot, half a walnut, pickled cucumbers, and capers.

  3. Ensure the mixture does not boil.

Serve

  1. Serve in a very 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
Thin slices of tender beef are the main body of the dish, cooked briefly to stay tender.
Flour
Coating the beef helps it brown and thickens the gravy as it cooks.
Butter
Frying the beef in butter gives browning and a rich flavour.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the beef simmers in.
Pickled cucumbers
Add a sharp acidity that cuts through the rich gravy and butter.

The step that matters

Keep the mixture from boiling. Boiling a sauce thickened with flour and butter can make it grainy or cause the thin beef to toughen. Gentle heat keeps the texture smooth and the meat tender.

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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