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Collops of Beef
I nice rump steak I small onion 1 tablespoonful of butter 1 teaspoonful of salt I small cucumber 1/2 pint of stock or water I 1 tablespoonful of flour 1/4 teaspoonful of pepper 1 tablespoonful of capers Cut the steak into small round or square pieces, suitable for one person. Put the butter into a frying pan, and when hot, brown the steak quickly, first on one side and then on the other; sprinkle over and around them the flour, add the stock or water, the cucumber cut into thin slices, and the onion chopped. Cover the pan, and stew slowly ten minutes, add the other ingredients, and serve.
A quick pan dish built on thin slices of steak, a flour-thickened pan sauce and, unusually for modern tables, cooked cucumber. It comes together in about twenty minutes from a cold pan.
- CollopsA collop is simply a small slice or scallop of meat. Cutting the pieces small is what makes ten minutes of stewing enough for rump.
- Half a pint of stockA US half-pint is one cup; an imperial half-pint is ten fluid ounces. With a tablespoon of flour it gives a thin gravy rather than a thick sauce; reduce it uncovered for a minute or two at the end if you want it heavier.
- The flour goes on dryIt is sprinkled over the browned meat and into the hot butter before the liquid, which cooks the raw taste out of it. Add the stock in a stream and stir as it thickens or the flour will set in lumps.
- Cucumber as a cooked vegetableNineteenth-century cookery stewed cucumber routinely. Slice it thin, and peel and seed it if the skin is thick or waxed, since supermarket cucumbers are tougher-skinned than the small garden sorts assumed here.
- Capers last"Add the other ingredients" means the salt, pepper and capers, off the direct boil. Capers turn muddy and lose their sharpness if they simmer; a minute in the hot gravy is plenty.
- Brown hard, then lower the heatThe pan must be genuinely hot for the initial browning, and the ten-minute stew must be a bare simmer. A rolling boil in that shallow liquid will tighten the meat well before the cucumber softens.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight; one rump steak cut up this way will serve two, with bread and a salad.
"Collops" is an old English cookery word for cut meat, and it predates the French-derived "escalope" that came to be preferred on restaurant menus; Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, was traditionally the day of the last meat before Lent. Instead of the roast or the long-braised joint that kept a coal range going for hours, a pound of steak is sliced thin so it cooks through in minutes, and the cucumber and capers do the work that a heavy brown sauce would otherwise do. Cooked cucumber, now nearly forgotten outside a few stewed and buttered preparations, was ordinary summer fare in Anglo-American kitchens of the period, when it was cheap and abundant.