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Frizzled Beef
Melt one tablespoon butter, add one tablespoon flour and one half pound dried beef. Cook five minutes, add one half cup stock, few drops onion juice, one half teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, two eggs well beaten. Cook two minutes and serve.
A chafing-dish supper dish built on dried beef, thickened at the end with beaten egg rather than milk. The hinge is the egg: two minutes of gentle heat is all it gets, and any more than that curdles the sauce into scrambled shreds.
- Dried beef todayThe original means salt-cured, air-dried beef sliced paper thin — sold now as chipped or dried beef in jars or sealed packets. It is intensely salty; tear it into bite-sized pieces and, if the brand is a strong one, cover with hot water for a minute and drain before frizzling.
- Do not saltNo salt is called for and none should be added. Half a pound of dried beef plus stock plus Worcestershire carries all the seasoning the dish needs.
- "Frizzled"It means cooking the beef in fat until the edges curl and brown slightly. The five minutes with butter and flour is doing two jobs — crisping the meat and cooking the raw taste out of the flour — so keep it moving over moderate heat.
- Onion juicePeriod cooks grated an onion and used the expressed liquid to get flavour without pieces. Grate on the fine side of a box grater and press through a sieve; the recipe asks only for a few drops, so use it sparingly.
- The egg stepBeat the eggs, then temper them with a spoonful or two of the hot sauce before they go into the pan, and pull the pan off direct heat while you stir them in. Over a chafing-dish water bath this happens naturally; over a gas flame it will not.
- StockHalf a cup of unsalted or low-sodium beef stock. Commercial salted broth on top of cured beef will make the dish inedible.
- Yield and servingServes two generously, three at a stretch. It wants toast points, split baking-powder biscuits, or plain boiled rice under it, and it must go to the table immediately — the egg-bound sauce does not hold or reheat.
Dried beef in a cream or egg sauce over toast is one of the great American chafing-dish staples, and its presence in an early cook book is a reminder of what that vessel was for: the chafing dish is generally associated with the late-Victorian and Edwardian late supper, cooked at the table after the theatre or a card party, and is often said to have suited households where the kitchen staff had gone to bed. Shelf-stable dried beef was ideally suited to it, since the meat needed no refrigeration and no butchering, only a pan and a few minutes. The same combination went on to a long institutional career in the twentieth century, when the milk-thickened version acquired its familiar army nickname; the egg-bound sauce here is the older and more genteel treatment, closer to a savoury custard than to a white sauce.