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YANKEE DRIED BEEF
Slice very thin, put in frying-pan with water to cover, let come to boiling point, pour off, and add pint of milk, lump of butter, and a thickening of a little flour and milk, stir well, and, just before serving, some add an egg, stirring it in quickly; or, chip very fine, freshen, add a lump of butter and six or eight eggs, stir well, and serve at once. Cold boiled or baked beef may be sliced and cooked in the same way. Or, after the freshening, first frizzle it in butter, dredge with flour, and add the milk. When ends or thin pieces of dried beef become too dry and hard, put in cold water and boil slowly six or eight hours, and slice when cold; or, soak over night in cold water, and boil three or four hours. Many think all dried beef is improved by this method.
Three related treatments of dried beef in one paragraph: creamed, scrambled with eggs, and frizzled then creamed. The hinge in all of them is the blanching step, which pulls out salt.
- What dried beef is nowThe nearest supermarket equivalent is jarred or packaged chipped beef, already sliced paper-thin, though it can be quite salty in its own right. Bresaola or a dry-cured beef from a deli counter is arguably closer in character and needs no freshening.
- Freshening is not optional"Freshen" means the covered-with-water-and-brought-to-a-boil step, then draining. With modern packaged chipped beef one blanch is plenty; taste the beef before you salt anything afterward, and expect to add no salt at all.
- Quantities the original omitsA pint of milk and a "lump of butter" suit roughly 4 to 6 oz of dried beef and serve four. Figure 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour for that pint, which gives a sauce that coats rather than sets.
- The thickening"A thickening of a little flour and milk" is a slurry stirred into the hot milk. The frizzle-first variation is better technique: cook the beef in butter, dredge with flour to make a roux in the pan, then add milk gradually.
- The egg finishThe egg stirred in "just before serving" is a liaison and must not boil, or it curdles into threads. Pull the pan off the heat first, temper the beaten egg with a spoonful of the hot sauce, then stir it back in.
- Six or eight eggsThat is a generous scramble for the same 4 to 6 oz of beef, feeding four to six. Keep the heat low and stop while the eggs still look slightly loose; the residual heat finishes them.
- The six-to-eight-hour boilThis applies only to genuinely rock-hard ends of home-dried beef, which need long moist heat to become sliceable. Do not do it to packaged chipped beef, which will disintegrate.
- ServingCreamed dried beef was and is a breakfast dish, spooned over toast, split biscuits, or boiled potatoes. The scrambled version stands on its own.
Dried beef is one of the oldest American keeping meats: lean cuts, usually from the round, salted and air-dried or lightly smoked so they would hold through a season without ice. By the 1870s, when Buckeye Cookery was assembled in Ohio, a household might still dry its own but could also buy it by the piece, which is why the book gives directions for "ends or thin pieces" gone too hard to slice. The creamed-on-toast version became institutional food in the twentieth century through army and navy kitchens, where it acquired a barracks nickname, but its origins are domestic and thrifty.