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Collops, Beef
Take two pounds of tender beef steak, and cut it into rounds about three inches wide and three-quarters of an inch thick. Dredge a little flour over these, and fry them in hot butter or dripping till they are lightly browned on both sides. Put them into a stewpan with a pint of good gravy, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of white pepper, a tea-spoonful of capers bruised, a tea-spoonful of walnut ketchup, and two pickled gherkins thinly sliced. Simmer gently for ten or twelve minutes, and send to table as hot as possible. Probable cost, beef, 1s. 1d. per pound. Sufficient for four persons.
A quick braise rather than a stew: the ten-minute simmer only works because the meat is a tender cut sliced thin. Everything else is about sauce.
- The cut is the hingeRounds three inches across and three-quarters of an inch thick, cut from rump, sirloin or fillet tails, will be tender after ten minutes in liquid. Chuck or shin treated this way comes out grey and tough; those cuts want an hour and a half at a bare simmer.
- "Good gravy" means stockIn Victorian usage gravy is a strong brown beef stock, not a flour-thickened pan sauce. A pint is 20 fl oz (about 2 1/2 US cups); use a well-reduced beef stock, unsalted if possible, since a teaspoon of salt is already going in.
- The flour does the thickeningThe dredging flour browns in the fat and then loosens into the stock, giving a lightly bound sauce. Dredge sparingly and shake off the excess or the sauce turns pasty.
- Walnut ketchupA thin, dark, salty condiment of green walnuts, spice and vinegar, once on every sideboard and still made commercially in Britain. A teaspoon of mushroom ketchup or a scant teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce covers the same ground.
- Capers and gherkinsBoth are here for acidity, and they are what keeps the dish from being merely brown. Bruising the capers releases them into the sauce; rinse if they are salt-packed.
- White pepperWhite pepper is often used in period recipes for pale sauces, where black specks would show, though it also tastes different from black. In a dark gravy like this one the distinction matters little, so use whichever you have.
- Fry hot, and in batchesTwo pounds of collops will not brown in one pan. Crowding drops the heat and the meat steams; work in two or three lots and keep the fond for the stewpan.
- YieldFour as written, with potatoes or a rice border. The sauce is generous enough that mashed potato or toast is worth having.
Collop is an old word for a slice of meat, in use in English since at least the medieval period and surviving in Scotland long after it faded in the south. Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, took its name from the fried meat eaten up before Lent. The dish belongs to a broad Victorian family of made-over beef preparations in which the sauce carries the interest: capers, pickled gherkin and a bottled ketchup were the household cook's shortcut to the sharp, salty edge a French kitchen would have got from a reduction. Cassell's inclusion of the price per pound may be read as characteristic of the book, which seems to have been written for a mistress budgeting a household as much as for the cook working the range.