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Scotch Collops

A dish of thinly diced lean steak cooked with onion, butter, stock, and served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Scotch Collops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove all the fat from the steak and cut it into very thin small dice.

  2. Mince the onion very finely.

Cook

  1. Mix the steak and onion together, season with pepper and salt, and place in a saucepan with the butter.

  2. Stir for five minutes, then pour in the stock, bring to a boil, and simmer for one hour.

Serve

  1. Arrange neatly on a hot dish and place the snippets of toast around.

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 + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lean steak
Provides the main body of the dish, cooking into tender meat in the stock.
Stock
Supplies the liquid that simmers the meat and keeps it moist.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the steak and onion begin to cook gently.
Onion
Adds aroma and savoury flavour as it softens into the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering the steak. Once the stock is added, the liquid must stay at a gentle simmer. A hard boil toughens the meat's proteins and can dry out the dish, while a slow simmer lets the connective tissue soften and the meat stay tender.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter. 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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