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Beef Collops, Minced
Remove all skin from one pound of rump steak, and mince it finely. Put a little butter or beef dripping into a saucepan, with an onion chopped fine, and a tea-spoonful of flour, and stir over the fire until nicely browned. Then add the minced meat, and keep turning it for ten minutes or so with a fork. Add pepper and salt to taste, and as much boiling water as will cover the meat. Close the lid, and let it simmer very gently for about forty minutes. Serve hot with mashed potatoes. Probable cost, 1s. 2d.
A plain braised mince, and the method still works exactly as written. A few notes on the vocabulary and on where the dish can go wrong.
- "Collops" and "minced"A collop is a small slice or cutlet of meat; minced collops means the meat is chopped rather than sliced. Hand-mincing with a knife gives a coarser, better texture than packaged ground beef, but 1 lb of coarsely ground chuck or rump is a fair substitute.
- Rump steakBritish rump corresponds roughly to the American top sirloin, not the cut sold as rump roast in the US. It holds up to the 40-minute simmer without drying out.
- Brown the roux firstThe hinge of the dish: the onion, butter and flour must actually colour before the meat goes in. That browning is the only source of depth here, since there is no stock, wine or tomato. Stop short of bitter.
- Boiling water, not coldAdding boiling water keeps the pan from dropping temperature and seizing the meat. If you prefer, use beef stock; the original relies on the dripping and the browned flour for flavour.
- Beef drippingRendered beef fat, still sold in Britain and worth seeking out for this. Butter works; a neutral oil will make the dish noticeably flatter.
- Simmer means barely movingForty minutes at a bare tremble, lid on. A rolling boil will tighten the mince into pellets and reduce the liquid to paste.
- YieldOne pound of meat serves two generously or three modestly with the mashed potatoes. Season at the end as well as at the start; flour-thickened gravy mutes salt.
- Probable cost1s. 2d. is one shilling and twopence, or fourteen old pence.
Minced collops belong to a family of British and especially Scottish dishes in which beef is chopped, browned with onion and thickened flour, and stewed briefly — "collops in the pan" appears in Scottish cookery writing well before Cassell's, and the dish is often described there as a supper or breakfast standby. The word collop itself is old, used in English from the medieval period for a slice of meat, and it survives in the phrase "a collop of bacon". The costing at the end is characteristic of late-Victorian household dictionaries, which sold themselves on economy as much as on cookery, and a pound of rump stretched over three people with potatoes was exactly the kind of arithmetic their readers were expected to do.