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Collops

Thin slices of meat fried in butter and served with gravy, optionally seasoned with salt, pepper, ketchup, bacon, or white gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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

Cook the collops

  1. Fry the collops in butter for 2 minutes on each side.

  2. Place them in a hot dish.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Strain and thicken the gravy in the frying pan, then bring it to a boil.

  2. Pour the gravy over the collops.

  3. For an alternative, season the collops with salt and pepper, then simmer in gravy with bits of bacon.

  4. If using white gravy, add lemon peel, mace, and cream.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Ketchup + creamtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
Thin slices of meat that form the main body of the dish, cooked quickly to stay tender.
Butter
Fat for frying the collops, adding richness and browning their surface.
Gravy
Moist sauce that coats the collops and adds savoury flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the white gravy version.

The step that matters

Frying the collops. Thin slices cook fast, so frying for too long dries and toughens the meat. Brief high heat browns the surface while keeping the inside moist.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, pepper, ketchup, lemon, cream):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, pepper, ketchup, lemon, cream. 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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