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Beef Collops

Beef collops are thin slices of beef browned, simmered in brown gravy with eschalot, butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Beef Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the beef into pieces about 3 inches long.

  2. Dredge the pieces in flour and fry them in butter until browned.

Stew and serve

  1. Place the fried beef in a stewpan and cover with brown gravy.

  2. Add the minced eschalot, a lump of butter rolled in flour, pepper, and salt.

  3. Stew gently without boiling for a few minutes.

  4. Serve hot with pickles or a squeeze of 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Flour and butter 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 of the dish; tender lean cuts stay soft when stewed gently.
Flour
Coats the beef so it browns in the butter and thickens the gravy as it stews.
Butter
Fries the beef to a browned surface and, rolled in flour, helps thicken the sauce.
Brown gravy
Forms the savoury sauce that moistens the beef during the stew.

The step that matters

Stew gently without boiling. Boiling toughens meat proteins and can make the thickened sauce break or scorch, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, butter, 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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