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Dried Beef Relish
This is a way to use up the hard. small ends of dried beef, that you cannot cut.
Grate the meat, and to every cupful allow four tablespoonfuls of cream, four eggs well beaten, and a little pepper. Put the meat and cream into a stewing pan ; when hot, add the eggs; stir until the mixture becomes thick. Serve immediately on squares of buttered toast.
A thrift dish that turns the unsliceable heel of a dried beef into something closer to a savory scramble. The whole thing lives or dies on heat control.
- Keep the heat lowFour eggs to a quarter cup of cream is a rich, loose custard, and it will curdle into hard grains over a brisk flame. Use the lowest heat that will thicken it, pull the pan off before it looks done, and stir constantly; residual heat finishes it.
- Dried beef todayOld-style dried beef came as a whole muscle you sliced or shaved yourself, leaving the hard ends this recipe was written for. Supermarket chipped beef is already paper-thin, sold in jars or packets; chop or crumble it rather than grating, or pulse it briefly in a food processor.
- SaltDried beef is heavily cured and generally needs no added salt; the original calls only for pepper. If your beef is very salty, cover it with hot water for a minute and drain before using.
- CreamFour tablespoonfuls is a quarter cup. A rich cream is probably what was intended; half-and-half works and gives a slightly less rich result.
- YieldOne cupful of grated meat with four eggs serves two generously, three at a push. Two thick slices of buttered toast per person, cut into squares as directed.
- Serve at onceThe mixture stiffens and weeps as it stands, and reheating makes it rubbery. Have the toast buttered and waiting before the eggs go into the pan.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a genre of small summer cookery books aimed at households cooking on coal or wood ranges, where the point was to get supper on the table without heating the kitchen for an hour; the collection is generally attributed to Sarah Tyson Rorer of the Philadelphia Cooking School, whose writing has exactly this brisk, economical register. Dried beef was a staple of the American pantry long before reliable home refrigeration, sold as a salted, smoked, air-dried round that kept well and was shaved thin at the counter or at home. The hard end of such a piece was a familiar household nuisance, and creamed or egg-bound chipped beef on toast seems to have been a common use for it, an ancestor of the creamed chipped beef that later became army mess food. The dish also shows the period's habit of stretching a small quantity of expensive cured meat with eggs and cream, and of treating toast as the default vehicle for anything soft and savory.