Beef Collops
1 lb. hamburg steak 1 chopped onion 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful water or stock 1 tablespoonful flour Salt and pepper to taste 1 teaspoonful mushroom catsup or Worcestershire sauce Sippets of toast or croutons Mashed potatoes or plain boiled rice Melt Crisco in saucepan, put in beef and onion and fry light brown, then sprinkle in flour, add water or stock, catsup or sauce, and seasonings. Cover pan and let contents simmer very gently forty-five minutes. Arrange collops on hot platter with border of sippets of toast or croutons, or border of hot mashed potatoes, or plain boiled rice.
A plain skillet dish from the Crisco kitchen, closer to a loose mince than to the sliced "collops" the name once meant. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the terms and one of the timings need translating.
- Hamburg steakThis is simply ground beef, not a formed patty. Use 80/20 chuck; anything leaner will go dry and grainy over a long simmer.
- CriscoCrisco was the new all-vegetable shortening the book was written to promote, and there is no flavour reason to seek it out. Two tablespoons of neutral oil, butter, or beef drippings do the same job.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice condiment, common in British kitchens of the period and now sold mainly by specialist grocers. Worcestershire, as the recipe allows, is the straightforward stand-in; a teaspoon of soy sauce plus a little mushroom powder is close in effect.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast, cut and arranged around the edge of the platter to soak up gravy. Croutons or plain toast points serve the same purpose.
- The forty-five minutesGround beef is cooked through in minutes, so the long simmer is about softening the onion and reducing the gravy, not the meat. Keep it at a bare tremble with the lid on and check the liquid; if it tightens before the time is up, add a splash more stock rather than letting the pan dry out. Twenty-five to thirty minutes gives much the same result if you are pressed.
- Browning first"Fry light brown" means letting the beef sit undisturbed long enough to colour before you break it up. That crust is the only deep flavour in a dish with no wine, tomato or herbs in it.
- The gravyOne tablespoon of flour to one cup of liquid gives a thin, pourable sauce, which is what the border of toast or potato is there to catch. Sprinkle it over the hot fat and cook it a minute before the liquid goes in or it will taste raw.
- YieldA pound of beef with a starch border feeds three, or four modestly. Salt generously at the end, after the Worcestershire has gone in.
A collop is an old word for a slice or small cut of meat, used in English and Scots cookery from the medieval period onward; Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, was traditionally when households ate up their meat before Lent. Proper Scotch collops were thin escalopes of beef or veal, quickly fried and served in their own gravy, and "minced collops" using chopped beef became the everyday version, still a Scottish home-cooking staple. This entry belongs to the minced branch, filtered through an American promotional cookbook: A Calendar of Dinners was published by Procter & Gamble to give buyers of Crisco something to do with it, which is why a solid vegetable shortening opens a dish that would once have started with beef dripping or butter. The sippets of toast, the choice of mashed potato or plain boiled rice, and the reliance on bottled sauce for depth are all marks of the plain, economical Anglo-American table of the 1910s.