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Collops, Beef, with Onions
Prepare the meat as in the last recipe. Dredge the collops with flour, and put them in the frying-pan with six or eight large onions cut into rounds, and four ounces of butter, lard, or dripping. Pepper them, and when they are browned, cover the pan closely. Before serving, take out the meat, put it on a hot dish, add half a cupful of boiling water, and a table-spoonful of ketchup to the onions. Boil up, and pour the sauce round the meat. Time, twenty to thirty minutes, or until the onions are tender. Probable cost, beef, 1s. 1d. per pound. Sufficient for four persons.
A straightforward pan dish of thin beef slices smothered in onions, from a book that assumed you had read the preceding entry. The gaps worth filling are what "collops" means, what "ketchup" meant in 1890s Britain, and how to keep the meat from overcooking while the onions soften.
- What a collop isThin slices cut across the grain from rump, topside or buttock steak, usually trimmed of fat and beaten flat with a rolling pin or cutlet bat to about a quarter of an inch. The omitted "last recipe" would have given the cut and its preparation; any thin, tenderised beef slice works.
- Ketchup is not tomatoIn a British book of this period, unqualified "ketchup" most often means mushroom ketchup, sometimes walnut. Both are thin, dark, salty and intensely savoury. Tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweet and thick, which is a different dish; mushroom ketchup is still sold, and Worcestershire sauce is the nearest common substitute.
- Fat quantityFour ounces is 115 g, generous by modern habit but it is doing the work of frying six to eight onions. Two ounces is plenty if the pan is heavy and covered; the onions release their own moisture once the lid goes on.
- Half a cupfulThe cupful was not a standardised measure; read it as roughly 4 to 5 fl oz, about 120 to 140 ml. It is deglazing liquid rather than a braise, so the finished sauce is meant to be scant and clinging.
- Order of cookingTwenty to thirty minutes will turn thin collops grey and tough. Brown the meat first over good heat, set it aside, then cook the onions covered until soft, and return the beef for a minute or two at the end. The stated time belongs to the onions, not the beef.
- DredgingThe flour coating browns and later thickens the pan liquid. Shake off the excess or it will clag in the fat and taste raw.
- YieldFour servings, as stated. The recipe gives no weight of beef; six to eight large onions will come to well over 2 lb once peeled.
"Collop" is an old word in English cookery for a thin slice of meat, recorded well before this book and surviving in Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, when the last of the household's bacon and eggs were eaten before Lent. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century the term still covered quick-frying slices of various meats, often the cheaper cuts beaten thin, aimed squarely at households that wanted a hot meat dish in half an hour on a single hob. The costing in pence per pound is a standing feature of the book and one of its most useful survivals, since it fixes beef as a real but manageable expense for the readership it addressed. The recipe calls simply for "ketchup," a word that in Victorian kitchens often meant the older sort, a spiced, fermented mushroom liquor that served as a bottled savoury shortcut long before tomato ketchup displaced it in the popular meaning of the name.