Home › Meats and Poultry › Frizzled Beef
Frizzled Beef
Use a quarter of a pound of dried beef, tender, crimson and shaved very fine. Into the pan put one tablespoon of butter, let it melt, then add one and one-half tablespoons of flour. Rub to a smooth paste, pour in one cup of thin cream, add a dash of paprika, then the beef. Allow it to boil up, then serve on rounds of toast.
A cream-sauce dish that stands or falls on the beef: dried beef is heavily salted, and the sauce is built without any salt of its own for that reason.
- Dried beef today"Tender, crimson and shaved very fine" describes air-dried salt beef sliced almost translucent. The jarred or packaged chipped beef sold now is wetter and saltier; rinse it briefly in warm water and pat dry if it tastes harsh, and tear it into bite-sized pieces rather than leaving whole sheets.
- No added saltThe recipe calls for none, the beef supplying plenty on its own. Taste at the end and season only if the beef was mild.
- Thin creamPeriod "thin cream" is roughly today's light cream, about 18 to 20 percent fat; half-and-half, at around 10 to 12 percent, is a thinner substitute. Whole milk works and gives a looser sauce; heavy cream will be too rich for a full cup.
- Cook the roux firstButter and flour should bubble together for a minute or two before the cream goes in, or the sauce keeps a raw-flour taste. Add the cream gradually and whisk until smooth.
- "Allow it to boil up"This means one brief simmer to thicken the sauce, not sustained boiling. The beef is already cured and ready to eat; long cooking in the pan tends to toughen it.
- Quantity and yieldA quarter pound of beef with one cup of cream serves two generously, or four as a light course. It scales up straightforwardly.
- The toastCut rounds from firm white bread and toast them dry and crisp. Soft bread will soak through and collapse under the sauce.
Dried or "chipped" beef was a staple of the American larder long before refrigeration, and creaming it over toast was one of the standard ways to stretch a small quantity of salted meat across a family breakfast or supper. The name is generally traced to the frizzling of thin slices in hot fat; by the time this version was written the beef is simply warmed through in a white sauce, and the older name has stuck to the newer method. The dish is best known now under the barracks nickname it acquired in the twentieth-century U.S. military, where it was served in enormous quantities. Paprika here is doing double duty as seasoning and colour.