Beef Collops
1 lb. hamburg steak. 1 chopped onion. 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful water or stock 1 tablespoonful flour Salt and pepper to taste 1 teaspoonful mushroom catsup or Worcestershire sauce Sippets of toast or croutons Mashed potatoes or plain boiled rice Melt Crisco in saucepan, put in beef and onion and fry light brown, then sprinkle in flour, add water or stock, catsup or sauce, and seasonings. Meats Cover pan and let contents simmer very gently forty-five minutes. Arrange collops on hot platter with border of sippets of toast or croutons, or border of hot mashed potatoes, or plain boiled rice.
A plain braise of thin beef slices in a flour-thickened pan gravy, from the 1913 Crisco promotional cookbook. The method is sound; the quantities need filling in.
- The cut"Collops" here means thin slices of beef, usually cut from round or another lean cut and often flattened. Allow about 1 1/2 lb for four people, sliced no thicker than 1/4 inch across the grain, and a medium onion sliced thin.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening the book exists to sell. Any cooking fat does the same job; 2 tablespoons of oil, butter, or beef dripping are all reasonable substitutes.
- Brown properly, in batchesThe colour on the meat is the only source of depth in this gravy. A cupful of liquid over crowded, grey meat gives a pallid result. Sear the slices in two or three batches, then soften the onion in the same fat.
- The forty-five minutesThin lean slices may not become tender in three-quarters of an hour at a simmer; they can pass through a tough stage and only come back with longer, gentler cooking. Either keep the heat very low and give it 1 1/2 hours, or sear the slices quickly and remove them, reducing the gravy separately.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not the tomato condiment. It is still sold by British specialists; Worcestershire sauce, which the recipe offers as an alternative, is the practical stand-in. Add either at the end if you want the aroma to survive.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried or toasted crisp, arranged around the edge of the dish. They soak up gravy and were standard borders for stewed meats. Croutons or a border of mashed potato do the same work.
- YieldServes four with the potato or rice border.
Collop is an old English kitchen word for a slice of meat, in use since at least the fourteenth century and surviving in Scots and northern English usage long after it faded elsewhere; Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, was traditionally marked by eating up the household's bacon collops before Lent. By 1913 the term had thinned out into a general name for thin-sliced beef stewed in gravy, a thrifty way to make a lean cut of round go round a table. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco is characteristic of that book: Procter & Gamble had introduced hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1911, and the recipe collection was built to show the new fat doing every job that lard, butter, and drippings had done, in dishes homemakers already knew by name.