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Beef Collops, with Onions
Make some butter hot in a frying-pan; get ready one pound of collops, they should be cut thinner than is usual for broiling; and cut two middle-sized onions into rings. Dust a little pepper over the collops, put them in the pan with the onions, and when they are browned cover the pan closely up till done. This will be in about ten minutes. Serve hot with a little oyster pickle or walnut ketchup added to the gravy in the pan. Time, three minutes to fry; ten to simmer. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. per pound. Sufficient for two persons.
A quick pan dish of thin beef slices smothered in onions, finished with a sharp condiment stirred into the pan juices. The whole thing works only if the beef is cut properly thin.
- What a collop isA collop is simply a thin slice of meat — for this dish a tender frying cut such as rump or sirloin. The instruction to cut them "thinner than is usual for broiling" suggests something around a quarter of an inch; anything much thicker is unlikely to be tender in ten minutes of covered cooking.
- Butter alone will burnGetting butter hot enough to brown beef takes it past the point where the milk solids scorch. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, and heat the pan properly before the meat goes in.
- Brown first, cover secondThe order matters: the collops and onion rings go in over decent heat and take colour, and only then does the lid go on. Covering early steams the meat grey and the onions never sweeten.
- Watch the ten minutesTen minutes covered is generous for slices this thin. Six to eight is usually enough for the onions to soften without the beef turning tough; check at six and pull the pan when the onions are translucent.
- Walnut ketchup and oyster pickleBoth were standard Victorian store-cupboard condiments — dark, salty, vinegary and pungent rather than sweet. Neither resembles tomato ketchup. Mushroom ketchup is the closest survivor; a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce or a mashed anchovy with a splash of vinegar does the same job of sharpening the pan gravy.
- SaltThe recipe seasons only with pepper; the oyster pickle or ketchup stirred in at the end would carry plenty of salt. If you finish with something milder, salt the beef before frying.
- Cost and yield"1s. 4d. per pound" is the book's own contemporary costing, not a modern guide to anything. The pound of meat with two onions is given as sufficient for two persons.
Collop is an old word for a slice of meat, Middle English and of uncertain, probably Scandinavian origin, recorded well before the Victorian period and surviving in Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, when households ate up their bacon and eggs before Lent. By the time Cassell's was compiled, the word had narrowed to mean a thin cut of beef or veal cooked fast in a pan — the nearest thing a nineteenth-century kitchen had to a minute steak, and a way of making cheaper, tougher cuts palatable without long stewing. The finish is the period signature: bottled walnut ketchup, mushroom ketchup and pickled oysters were the sort of thing said to be kept on hand for moments like this, when a plain pan of meat needed depth and acidity in a few seconds. Those bottles are the ancestors of the commercial brown sauces that displaced them.