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To Frizzle Beef
Shave off very thin pieces of beef, put them into a spider and pour a little warm water over them, stir up and turn off the water, add a piece of butter the size of an egg; to a pound of beef, put the whole over the fire; beat up two eggs with three tablespoonfuls of cream, dredge with flour, pour over it the beaten eggs and cream; season with parsley, pepper and salt, to taste.
A quick skillet dish of shaved beef bound with egg and cream. The unexplained rinse at the start is the clue to what the meat actually is.
- The beef is dried beefThe beef is almost certainly dried beef -- "Shave off very thin pieces" and the warm-water rinse both point to salt-cured dried beef, the chipped beef sold in jars or at the deli counter. The rinse draws out salt, and without it the finished dish is likely to be very salty (though the recipe does still call for salt to taste). Fresh beef shaved paper-thin (sandwich steak or shabu-shabu slices) also works, but then salt at the end rather than rinsing.
- A spiderA cast-iron frying pan, originally one with three legs for standing over coals. Any heavy skillet does the job; 10 inches suits a pound of beef.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. That is generous for a pound of beef but the fat is what carries the flour and cream into a sauce.
- "Frizzle" means what it saysThe point is to let the shaved beef curl and brown at its edges in the butter over fairly brisk heat before anything wet goes in. Two or three minutes, stirring. Add the egg and cream to pale, steamed meat and you get a bland scramble.
- Order of the flourThe instruction to "dredge with flour" comes after the butter is in and hot: dust a tablespoon or so over the beef and let it cook a moment in the fat, then add the egg-and-cream mixture. That thickens rather than lumps.
- Off the heat at the endTwo eggs beaten with three tablespoons cream will set almost instantly on a hot cast-iron surface. Pull the pan to a low burner or off the fire entirely and stir until the mixture just thickens and coats the meat; carried further it curdles into dry curds.
- SeasoningTaste before adding any salt. With true dried beef, pepper and parsley are usually all it needs.
- YieldA pound of beef with two eggs serves three to four. It is a breakfast or supper dish and wants toast, biscuits or boiled potatoes under it.
Frizzled beef belongs to the American household economy of thinly sliced salt-cured beef, a keeping meat that needed no refrigeration and could be shaved off as required. Cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of it: frizzled in butter, creamed on toast, folded into eggs. The version here sits between two dishes, using the cream-and-egg binding of a scramble rather than the flour-and-milk white sauce that later became the standard chipped-beef gravy. The word frizzle is older than the dish and simply describes meat curling and sputtering in hot fat. The "spider" in the instructions is simply a skillet: the name survived long after the legs that earned it did, and American cooks went on using it for flat pans well into the twentieth century.