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Died Beef with Cream
1/4 lb. smoked dried beef, thinly sliced 1 cup scalded cream 1 1/2 tablespoons flour Remove skin and separate meat in pieces, cover with hot water, let stand ten minutes, and drain. Dilute flour with enough cold water to pour easily, making a smooth paste; add to cream, and cook in double boiler ten minutes. Add beef, and reheat. One cup White Sauce I may be used in place of cream, omitting the salt.
A plain cream-thickened dish of salt-cured beef, the ancestor of the diner standby served over toast. Almost everything that can go wrong here is salt, so the ten-minute soak is not optional.
- The soak matters mostModern packaged dried beef is still heavily salted, and skipping the hot-water steep will make the sauce inedible. Pour hot water over the separated pieces, let stand ten minutes, drain, and taste a shred before you commit; a second soak is reasonable if it is still sharp.
- What dried beef is nowSmoked dried beef today comes as thin pressed slices in a jar or a sealed packet, sold under names like chipped beef. There is no skin to remove from the modern product, so ignore that instruction and simply tear the slices into rough pieces.
- Scalded creamScalding means heating just until bubbles form at the edge and a skin begins to set, around 180F, not a rolling boil. With unpasteurized cream it would have helped delay souring as well; with today's cream it mainly warms the liquid so the flour paste blends without lumps.
- Flour pasteOne and a half tablespoons of flour to a cup of cream gives a loose, pourable sauce rather than a thick gravy. Mix the flour with two or three tablespoons of cold water until perfectly smooth before it goes near the hot cream.
- Double boilerTen minutes over simmering water is what cooks out the raw flour taste, and the gentle heat keeps a cream sauce from catching. A heavy saucepan on low heat works if you stir steadily and accept a little more risk of scorching.
- White Sauce IThe alternative called for is the book's own basic flour-thickened milk sauce; use its proportions as given there. The direction to omit the salt applies to that sauce, since the beef supplies plenty.
- Reheating the beefAdd the beef only at the end and warm it through for a minute or two. Held longer in the hot sauce it turns leathery and gives up still more salt.
- Yield and servingThis makes two modest servings, three if stretched. Spoon it over buttered toast, split baking-powder biscuits, or boiled potatoes; a grind of black pepper is the only seasoning it needs.
Dried beef was one of the last survivals of household meat preservation on the American table: lean cuts, usually from the round, salt-cured and smoked until they would keep unrefrigerated for months, then shaved thin because the cured muscle is far too firm to chew in thick slices. By the time this book was written much of the curing had moved to packers, though the recipe still assumes the cook may be slicing it and trimming a skin. Creaming was a common treatment in the cookery-school writing of the period, where a milk or cream sauce thickened with flour served as the vehicle for turning small quantities of salted or leftover meat into a hot breakfast or supper dish. The same combination later became famous, and much maligned, as an army mess staple.