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Beef Collops

Beef collops are lightly floured beef pieces simmered in gravy with pickled cucumbers, capers, walnut, onion, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the beef into larger pieces in the form of Scotch collops.

  2. Hack the pieces lightly with a knife and dust with flour.

Cook and serve

  1. Melt butter in a stew pan and fry the collops quickly for about 2 minutes.

  2. Add the beef gravy and a bit of butter rolled in flour.

  3. Season with pepper and salt.

  4. Stir in the pickled cucumbers, capers, walnut, and onion.

  5. Stew the mixture together for about 5 minutes.

  6. Serve hot, garnished with lemon.

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. Cucumber + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Capers + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main meat, which is tenderised by hacking and browned briefly in butter.
Flour
Coats the beef and, with the butter, thickens the gravy as it cooks.
Beef gravy
Supplies the liquid that becomes the sauce, carrying moisture and savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds fat for frying and richness to the sauce.
Pickled cucumbers
Add sharp acidity that cuts the richness of the gravy and meat.
Capers
Contribute briny, sharp acidity that brightens the sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the collops quickly. A short, hot fry browns the flour-dusted surface and seals in juices. Cooking too long toughens the meat and dries it out before the sauce is added.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, butter, cucumber, capers, onion, pepper. 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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