Name: Minced Collops
Ingredients: 1 pound juicy beef; 2 ounces beef suet; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; butter (for cooking); water or gravy (as needed)

Why it works: Beef and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,847 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Minced Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

Remove all skin and gristle from the beef.
Mince the beef and beef suet very fine.
Add the salt and mix well.

Cook

Flour the collops lightly.
Melt a small amount of butter in a stewpan.
Stir in the collops and add enough water or gravy to moisten.

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.

Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,847 recipes

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

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, providing the meaty texture and flavour.
Beef suet: Adds fat, which keeps the minced meat moist and rich while cooking.

“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.