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Minced Collops

A dish of finely minced beef cooked with butter, flour, gravy, mushroom ketchup, and optional green pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,232 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Minced Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the beef into thin slices and mince it very finely.

Brown the meat

  1. Brown the butter in a frying pan, dredging it with a little flour.

  2. Add the minced meat and beat it with a spatula until it turns a nice brown color.

Stew and serve

  1. Combine the beef gravy with the minced collops in a saucepan and let it stew for 30 minutes.

  2. Just before serving, stir in the mushroom ketchup and add green pickles if desired.

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 + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Mushroom + ketchuptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Lean tender beef
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender through gentle stewing after mincing.
Butter
Fat for browning the meat, adding richness and a toasted, savoury flavour.
Flour
Dredged onto the butter and meat to lightly coat them and help thicken the gravy.
Beef gravy
Liquid that moistens the minced meat and carries the seasoning during stewing.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury, umami depth to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the minced meat. Beating the meat in the hot fat until it browns develops savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat tastes flat, and crowding or steaming it stops browning.

“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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