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Frizzled Dried Beef
Use one-half pound of dried beef; if it is very salty, freshen by washing twice in cold water and drying. Put two tablespoons of butter in a frying-pan and into this put the beef, shaking until it is thoroughly hot. Then add two tablespoons of flour, and the milk, making a cream sauce. Bring to a boil and add one-half teaspoon of Larkin Extract of Beef and an eighth-teaspoon of Larkin White Pepper. Serve on roast.
A straightforward creamed chipped beef, written for a household that had Larkin Company products in the cupboard. Two things in the original need filling in: the milk is never measured, and the last line almost certainly has a typo.
- "Serve on roast"Read this as "serve on toast." Creamed dried beef on toast is the standard form of the dish, and no earlier line prepares a roast.
- The missing milk quantityThe recipe says "the milk" as though a quantity had been given earlier. Two tablespoons each of butter and flour will make a medium sauce with about 1 cup of milk; use a little less for a thicker one, up to 1 1/2 cups for a thinner, more pourable sauce.
- Dried beef todaySold as chipped or dried beef in thin sheets, in jars or vacuum packs near the lunch meat. It is still salty enough that the rinse is worth doing; drain and pat dry so it browns rather than steams.
- Larkin Extract of BeefA concentrated beef paste of the Bovril type, sold direct to households by the Larkin Company of Buffalo through its mail-order club plan. Half a teaspoon of any beef base or a crumbled quarter of a bouillon cube stands in for it.
- Do not saltBetween the cured beef and the beef extract there is plenty of salt. Taste before adding any, and if the sauce comes out too salty, stretch it with more milk.
- FrizzlingThe point of shaking the beef in hot butter is to let the edges curl and catch a little colour, which is where the flavour comes from. Give it two or three minutes over medium-high heat before the flour goes in.
- YieldHalf a pound of beef with a cup of sauce feeds three to four over toast, or two as a main dish.
This is a Larkin Company recipe, and the branded ingredients are the giveaway: Larkin of Buffalo built its business selling soap and then a whole catalogue of household goods, including extracts and spices, direct to homes through clubs of neighbours who pooled their orders, with premiums thrown in. Cookbooks like this one circulated as part of that trade, and every recipe that names a Larkin product is quietly an advertisement. The dish itself long predates the company. Dried, salted beef was a keeping meat in American households well before refrigeration, and creaming it in a butter-and-flour sauce over toast was the ordinary way to make a small quantity of a strong, salty preserved meat feed a table. The same dish went on to a long institutional career in the American military, where it acquired a coarser nickname that has outlasted most of the polite ones.