Beef Collaps
1 1/2 pounds lean beef, chopped fine. 1 tablespoonful lard. 1 tablespoonful of butter. With enough water to cook it.
After being well cooked, thicken gravy, and season with vinegar and pepper.--Mrs. H.D.
A three-line skillet stew that assumes the cook already knows what collops are and how long beef takes. The gaps worth filling are the cut, the liquid, and the fact that no salt is mentioned.
- What "collops" means hereA collop is properly a small slice or scrap of meat, and Scotch collops were traditionally thin-cut beef browned and stewed. "Chopped fine" in this period means hand-minced with a knife or run through a meat chopper, closer to a coarse mince than to modern fine-ground beef, which will turn pasty in liquid.
- The cutThe recipe only says "lean beef"; round or a trimmed piece of chuck would both suit. Round holds its texture through a long simmer; anything very lean and ground will need less time than the recipe implies.
- "Enough water to cook it"Barely cover the meat, no more. The gravy is thickened at the end, so a flooded pan means a long reduction or a gluey result. Add water in small amounts if it cooks dry.
- Cooking timeNone is given. Hand-chopped round wants 45 minutes to an hour at a bare simmer to go tender; commercially ground beef needs 20 to 25 minutes and no more.
- FatA tablespoon each of lard and butter is a browning fat, not a stewing medium. Get the meat coloured in it first over decent heat; the browning is where most of the flavour in a dish this plain comes from.
- ThickeningThe period method is a spoonful of flour rubbed into soft butter, or slaked in cold water, stirred in and boiled a minute or two to lose the raw taste. About a tablespoon of flour per cup of liquid gives a gravy that coats.
- Vinegar and seasoningCider vinegar is the likely intent. Start with a teaspoon and taste; it is meant to sharpen the gravy, not to make it sour. Salt is not mentioned but is presumably assumed.
- Yield and servingA pound and a half of beef serves four. Rice, toast, or hot biscuit would all carry a gravy dish of this kind.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, is a collective book: hundreds of receipts sent in by named and initialled contributors, of which "Mrs. H.D." is one, written in the compressed shorthand that housewives used among themselves rather than for beginners. The word collop is old, generally traced to Middle English and cognate with Scandinavian words for a slice of meat, and it survives in the name of Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday when the last of the household's meat was eaten before Lent. By the nineteenth century "Scotch collops" had become a standard English and American term for thin beef slices or minced beef stewed in a little gravy, and the dish had drifted, as this version shows, from slices toward chopped meat.