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Creamed Dried Beef with Macaroni
½ lb. sliced dried beef 4 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) but- ¼ lb. macaroni ter 4 hard cooked eggs cut in 4 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) flour rings 1 pint (2 cups) milk Salt and paprika to taste Break the macaroni into inch lengths, then throw it into boiling salted water, allow to cook for forty minutes, then drain and keep hot.
Melt the butter in a casserole, then fry the beef until slightly browned, then remove the beef, stir in the flour, and cook for eight minutes; add the seasonings and the beef. Arrange the macaroni on a hot casserole, pour over the beef, and garnish with the eggs. 1 heaping tablespoonful (1 1/2 pint (1 cup) stock
The typesetting here has collapsed the ingredient column into the text, and one step has dropped out entirely, so read the method with an eye to what the sauce actually needs.
- The missing milkThe pint (2 cups) of milk is listed but never appears in the instructions. It goes in after the flour has cooked, added gradually off the heat or over low heat and whisked smooth before the beef returns.
- Quantities checkedThe printed page gives a quarter-pound of macaroni and a half-pound of sliced dried beef, as our text now reads. Those amounts balance the 4 oz butter, 4 oz flour and 2 cups milk.
- The trailing line"1 heaping tablespoonful… ½ pint (1 cup) stock" at the end belongs to an adjacent recipe, not this one. Ignore it.
- Casserole means the panHere "casserole" appears to mean the cooking vessel itself: "Melt the butter in a casserole, then fry the beef" is a stove-top instruction, not an oven one, and the "hot casserole" the macaroni is arranged on reads as a warmed serving dish.
- Macaroni timingForty minutes reflects the thick, unenriched dried macaroni of the period. Modern elbow macaroni is done in 8 to 10 minutes; cook it just short of tender since it will sit under hot sauce.
- Salt the beef water, not the pasta sauceDried beef is cured and very salty. Taste before adding any salt at all — paprika and pepper are usually all the seasoning needed. If your beef is aggressively salty, rinse the slices in warm water and pat dry before frying.
- The rouxEight minutes of cooking flour in butter over anything but the gentlest heat will give a browned, nutty sauce rather than a white one. Two to three minutes over low heat is enough to cook out the raw taste.
- YieldAs balanced above, this serves four as a light supper. The hard-cooked eggs cut in rings are laid over the top at the last moment.
Dried beef — thin-sliced, salt-cured, air-dried top round, sold pressed into jars or by the ounce from a butcher's crock — was one of the standard shelf-stable meats of the American pantry before home refrigeration, and creaming it in a butter-and-flour sauce was the usual way to stretch a few ounces across a family. The dish is essentially the same one as the creamed chipped beef on toast that later generations of soldiers knew by a less printable name. The rings of hard-cooked egg over the top are pure period garnish, doing the work that a sprinkle of parsley or paprika does now.