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Chipped Beef in Cream
Make white sauce using 8 tablespoons Crisco, 8 tablespoons flour, 3 cups milk and 1 cup cream. To it add 1/2 pound dried beef broken into small pieces. Cook about 5 minutes and just before serving pour very slowly on to 2 well beaten eggs. Serve at once.
A rich creamed chipped beef, thickened twice: once with a heavy roux and again with beaten eggs stirred in off the heat. The egg step is where it succeeds or curdles.
- Temper, do not scrambleThe hot sauce goes onto the eggs, not the eggs into the pan, and it goes slowly while you whisk hard. Add it in a thin stream and do not return the mixture to direct heat; residual heat is enough to thicken it. Serve immediately, since it will keep tightening as it stands.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book was written to sell it. Butter is the obvious substitute at the same measure and gives a better flavour in a sauce this plain; because butter carries some water, the sauce will be very slightly less thick.
- That is a lot of rouxEight tablespoons of fat and eight of flour is half a cup of each to four cups of liquid, which yields a very thick, old-fashioned binding sauce. If you want something closer to modern creamed chipped beef, four to five tablespoons of each will do.
- Dried beefThis means salt-cured air-dried beef sliced paper thin, sold in jars or packets. It is aggressively salty. Add no salt to the sauce, taste at the end, and if the beef is very strong rinse it briefly in hot water and pat dry before breaking it up.
- Cook the flour firstFive minutes of cooking after the beef goes in is for heating through, not for cooking out the flour. Let the roux bubble two or three minutes before the milk goes in or the finished sauce will taste pasty.
- Eggs and heatFour cups of very hot sauce whisked into two eggs should carry them past setting temperature, but nothing here is measured and the mixture is never cooked further. If you are serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurised eggs.
- Yield and servingSomething over four cups of sauce once the beef and eggs are in; the recipe states no yield, but it would stretch to about six servings. It was the sort of thing ladled over toast, split baking powder biscuits or boiled rice, often finished with black pepper and a dusting of paprika.
Chipped beef was a nineteenth-century staple that survived into the twentieth because it kept without refrigeration: lean beef salted, dried and shaved into translucent sheets, sold loose from the barrel and later in the small glass jars still found today. Creamed on toast it became a fixture of American boarding houses, hotel breakfasts and army mess halls, where it acquired the soldier's nickname it is still known by. The beef is a flavouring, the eggs and milk are the substance, and the dish belongs to the thrifty category of supper made from a store-cupboard jar. A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books issued to promote Crisco after its introduction in the 1910s, which is why vegetable shortening turns up where any earlier cook would simply have written butter.