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Frizzled Beef
Shred some dried beef, parboil it until it is sufficiently freshened, drain off the water and add enough boiling water to cover it. Rub equal quantities of butter and flour together until smooth, then add to the beef. Beat up three eggs, yolks and whites together, stir these in with a little pepper, a couple of minutes before taking from the fire. This is to be served hot on toast.--Mrs. F.
A creamed chipped beef with an egg-thickened sauce, from the era when dried beef came off a whole salted, air-dried joint and needed real freshening. The hinge is the eggs: they go in off a hard boil, or the sauce curdles.
- The eggs are the whole trickBeat the eggs, then temper them with a ladle of the hot liquid before stirring them into the pan, and keep the heat low enough that the sauce never bubbles again. Two minutes of gentle cooking will thicken it; a boil will scramble it into curds.
- Dried beef todayModern jarred or packaged chipped beef is far milder than the hard-cured slab this recipe assumes. Taste it first: a 30-second rinse in hot water is usually enough, and a full parboil may leave it flavourless. If you have genuine air-dried salt beef, the original parboil-and-drain is warranted.
- "Shred"Tear or slice the beef into ribbons rather than mincing it. The point is threads of meat suspended in sauce, not a paste.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For about 1/2 lb of dried beef, figure roughly 2 cups of water and a beurre manié of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour. Three eggs on top of that gives a rich, custardy sauce.
- Butter and flour rawThe paste goes in uncooked, and the recipe never says how long it cooks before the eggs. If it goes in only briefly, the sauce can taste faintly of raw flour, so let it simmer three or four minutes first, then take the heat down for the eggs.
- SaltAdd none until the end. Even freshened dried beef carries plenty, and the amount left after parboiling is unpredictable.
- Yield and servingServes three or four over toast. Use bread sturdy enough not to collapse -- the sauce is loose, and it is meant to soak in rather than sit on top.
"Frizzled beef" normally meant dried beef tossed in a hot buttered pan until the edges curled and crisped; Mrs. F.'s version keeps the name but takes the creamed route. Dried beef itself was a keeping-meat, salted and air-dried so it would hold through a Virginia summer without ice, and it survived into the twentieth century as a pantry staple in jars long after households stopped curing their own. Thickening with whole beaten eggs rather than a straight flour sauce is the older technique here, closer to a liaison than to the white sauce that later versions -- including the army mess-hall descendant on toast -- settled on. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (variously dated 1878 and 1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, and many entries end with an initial rather than a full name, with quantities often left to the cook's judgement.