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Beef Collops

Beef collops are tender beef pieces sautéed with butter, gravy, pickled cucumbers, walnuts, capers, and onion.

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 like Scotch collops and hack them slightly with a knife.

  2. Dust the beef with flour.

Cook

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan over medium heat.

  2. Add the beef and fry quickly for 2 minutes.

  3. Pour in the gravy.

  4. Add butter rolled in flour.

  5. Season with pepper and salt.

  6. Add the cucumbers, walnut, capers, and onion.

  7. Stew for 5 minutes.

  8. Optionally, add white wine before serving.

Serve

  1. Transfer to a hot dish and serve immediately.

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
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender when quickly fried and then stewed.
Flour
Coats the beef and, with the butter, thickens the gravy into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and helps brown the beef when melted in the pan.
Gravy
Provides the liquid base that the meat and vegetables simmer in.
Pickled cucumbers
Add a sharp acidity that cuts through the richness of the sauce.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma as it softens in the sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the beef quickly. Searing the floured beef briefly over medium heat browns its surface and seals in juices; overcooking at this stage toughens the meat before the stew step.

Swap the walnut

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

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

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