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Fricassee of Dried Beef
Cook the same as Frizzled Beef, but use two even tablespoonfuls of flour instead of one. Add the beaten yolks of two eggs just as you take it from the fire.
Corned beef's liver may be cooked in the same way.
This is a variation entry that assumes you have the book's Frizzled Beef in front of you: dried beef torn small, warmed in butter, dusted with flour and loosened with milk or cream. Two things separate the fricassee from the parent dish — a doubled quantity of flour and an egg-yolk liaison stirred in off the heat.
- The hinge: the yolks go in off the firePull the pan from the burner, stir a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the beaten yolks, then return the mixture to the pan and stir until it thickens from the residual heat. If the sauce simmers after the yolks are in, they scramble and the fricassee turns grainy.
- Dried beef todayNineteenth-century dried beef came in a chunk to be shaved at home; the modern equivalent is sliced chipped beef in a jar or vacuum pack. It is aggressively salty — cover it with hot water for a minute or two, drain, and add no salt to the sauce until you have tasted it.
- Two even tablespoonfulsAn "even" spoonful is level, not heaped. Doubling to two level tablespoons of flour gives a noticeably thicker sauce, which is what allows the yolks to bind rather than thin out.
- Yield is unstatedNeither this entry nor the base recipe fixes a quantity. Figured on about 1/4 lb dried beef, 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk, it serves two to three on toast.
- "Corned beef's liver"This reads as a printer's slip. The likely sense is corned or cured beef liver, which is not something you will find now. Fresh calf's liver, cut in strips, behaves the same way in a flour-and-milk sauce, but it needs seasoning that the salted beef supplied on its own.
- ServingDishes of this kind were spooned over dry toast, split biscuits or boiled rice. In a book of hot-weather cooking the point is that nothing goes into the oven and the whole thing is off the stove in ten minutes.
Frizzled or chipped dried beef in cream sauce was one of the standard quick suppers of the American nineteenth-century kitchen, and it survived long enough to become a military mess staple in the twentieth. Turning it into a "fricassee" by thickening the sauce with egg yolks borrows a technique from French cookery, where a fricassee is a white stew finished with a liaison of yolks and cream rather than browned. Collections of hot-weather dishes of this kind were aimed at households with no summer cook and no wish to fire the range for hours: shelf-stable salted beef, two spoonfuls of flour and two eggs produce a substantial dish in minutes, without ice or a long fire. The frugality is characteristic too -- the same method is offered for a cheap cured organ meat, on the assumption that the sauce carries the dish.