Skip to main content
Main

Minced Collops

A dish of finely minced beef cooked with butter, flour, water or gravy, seasoned with salt, pepper, ketchup, and optional onion, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Mince the beef very finely, removing any gristle or skin.

Make the collops

  1. Brown the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the minced beef to the saucepan and stir well.

  3. Sprinkle in the flour and add the hot water or gravy.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and ketchup.

  5. If desired, chop and add the onion.

  6. Simmer slowly for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve in a hash dish, garnished with small pieces of toasted bread.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Beef
Provides the main body and savory meaty flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and nutty, browned flavor when cooked before the beef goes in.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and tang that rounds out the savory seasoning.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly for 1 hour. A gentle simmer lets the minced beef become tender and the flour fully cook and thicken the liquid. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and make the sauce uneven.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, flour, pepper, ketchup, bread):

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

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

More minced collops recipes

Savory 3 See all 35 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes