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Minced Collops

A minced beef dish cooked with onion, suet, butter, gravy, ketchup or oyster sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Minced Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove skin and gristle from the beef and mince it finely with the onion.

  2. Season the mixture with pepper and salt, then dust with flour.

Cook and serve

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan, add the minced mixture, and stir in beef gravy and ketchup or oyster sauce.

  2. Cook for 10 minutes until fully dressed and serve.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter 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

Beef
Provides the main body and savory meaty flavor of the dish.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the minced meat moist and rich as it cooks.
Flour
Dusted over the mixture to lightly thicken the juices and help bind the sauce.
Beef gravy
Adds liquid and savory depth that forms the sauce around the meat.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and moisture when minced with the beef.

The step that matters

Cooking the minced mixture. Stirring in the flour-dusted meat with liquid needs gentle, steady heat so the flour thickens smoothly instead of clumping, and the meat cooks through without drying out.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, flour, butter, ketchup. 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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