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Beef-collop

Thinly sliced beef collops cooked in butter and gravy with 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-collop

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the beef into 3-inch long pieces and beat the pieces with a knife.

  2. Coat the beef pieces in flour.

Cook and finish

  1. Fry the collops in butter over high heat for 2 minutes.

  2. Transfer the collops to a small saucepan and cover with gravy.

  3. Mix in the softened butter, pepper, salt, shallot, walnut, pickled cucumbers, and capers.

  4. Heat gently without boiling.

  5. 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
Tender thin slices that cook quickly and form the body of the dish.
Flour
Coats the beef so it browns and thickens the juices around it.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the beef and adds richness to the sauce.
Gravy
Liquid base that becomes the sauce and keeps the beef moist.
Pickled cucumbers
Add sharp acidity that cuts through the rich, savoury sauce.

The step that matters

Heat gently without boiling. Boiling toughens the thin beef slices and can cause the butter in the sauce to separate, so keep the heat low once the sauce is combined.

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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