Home › Meats › Dried Beef Frizzled
Dried Beef Frizzled
Chip dried beef very thin. To every half-pound allow a large tablespoonful of butter, a half pint of milk and one tablespoonful of flour. Melt the butter in a frying pan, then add the meat, and stir over the fire for about two minutes, or until the butter begins to brown; dredge in the flour, stir again, then add the milk and a little pepper, stir again until it boils, and serve immediately.
BEEF Dutch Style Prepare six pounds of tender round the same as for Collared Beef, at the end of the week, rub well into it the following mixture:
1 teaspoonful of pepper 1 tablespoonful of coriander seed 1 teaspoonful of gumbo fillet powder Bind the meat into a good shape, tie with tape, and wrap and sew in a piece of cheese cloth. Put it into a large kettle, cover with boiling water, boil one moment, and then stand where it cannot possibly boil for three hours. At the end of the second hour add as flavoring, one onion, two bay leaves, one teaspoonful of celery seed and one tablespoonful of juniper berries. Finish precisely the same as Collared Beef.
Two recipes share this page. The frizzled dried beef is straightforward and still works; the Dutch-style beef that follows depends on a week-long cure printed elsewhere in the book, and that portion should not be attempted from what is given here.
- Why the cautionBeef Dutch Style begins "prepare six pounds of tender round the same as for Collared Beef" — a week-long preparation printed elsewhere in the book — and this page gives no salt weight, no curing salt or saltpetre quantity, and no holding temperature. Holding a six-pound solid muscle for a week at unknown salt concentration and unknown storage temperature is the situation in which anaerobes such as Clostridium botulinum become a real concern. The subsequent cooking, deliberately held below a boil for three hours, is a poach, not a corrective. Use a current, tested corned or spiced beef recipe if you want this dish.
- Half a pintOne cup of milk to a half-pound of beef, thickened with a single tablespoon of flour. That is a deliberately thin sauce; it will coat the meat rather than blanket it.
- Dried beef todaySold as chipped or dried beef, usually in a jar or a small vacuum pack, already sliced paper-thin. Dried beef of the period was often sold as a piece of cured, dried round to be shaved at home, which is what "chip very thin" means.
- SaltThe recipe seasons with pepper only, and for good reason — the beef carries all the salt the dish needs. If yours tastes aggressive, cover it with boiling water for a minute and drain before frizzling. Taste the sauce before adding anything.
- FrizzlingThe two minutes are the point. The beef curls and the edges crisp as the butter browns; past that it turns to leather. Have the flour and milk to hand before the meat goes in the pan.
- Dredge in the flourHere it means sprinkle the flour over the meat and butter in the pan, not coat the beef beforehand. Stir it into the fat for a few seconds so it loses its raw taste before the milk goes in.
- Yield and servingA half-pound with a cup of sauce serves three as a light dish, two if it is the whole meal. It was — and still is — served over buttered toast, split biscuits or baked potato.
- Gumbo filet powderIn the second recipe, this is ground sassafras leaf, sold now as filé. It appears there as a dry rub seasoning rather than as a thickener.
Dried beef was one of the standard hot-weather proteins of the American household: shelf-stable, requiring no ice, and cooked in the two minutes it takes to brown butter. "Frizzle" is an old kitchen verb for frying something thin until the edges curl and hiss, and by the late nineteenth century frizzled dried beef in cream sauce on toast was a fixture of American breakfast and supper tables — the dish that would later acquire its unprintable army nickname. The Dutch-style beef beneath it belongs to a different tradition entirely, the spiced and pressed cold cured beef of Northern Europe, seasoned here with coriander, juniper and bay; the presence of gumbo filé in that spice rub is a distinctly American intrusion into an otherwise Continental formula.