Creamed Beef
Take freshly ground meat from the rump or round and cook it in a frying pan with a very little butter, stirring constantly and sprinkling at every turn with salt, pepper and flour. The meat should lose its red color but not brown. When done, thin with cream or milk; bring to a boil and serve in patty cups or on toast.
A quick skillet dish that is essentially a fresh-beef version of creamed chipped beef, thickened by flour dusted over the meat rather than by a separate roux.
- Quantities to work fromThe original gives none. One pound of ground beef, about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 to 1 1/2 cups milk or cream makes four servings on toast.
- "Freshly ground" is the pointThis meant meat ground at home or by the butcher the same day, from rump or round rather than trimmings. Buy coarsely ground beef with a modest fat content; very lean grinds go dry, since there is almost no added fat here.
- Cook it through anyway"Should lose its red color but not brown" describes a pale, crumbly stage rather than a seared one. Ground beef needs an internal temperature of 160F, so keep it moving over medium heat until no pink remains, then thin — the milk stage brings it well past temperature.
- Flouring as you goSprinkling flour over the meat in stages, rather than dumping it in, coats the crumbles and lets the starch cook in the butter and rendered fat, which helps avoid the raw-flour taste.
- Thinning without lumpsAdd the milk or cream a splash at a time off the heat, stirring to smooth each addition before the next. Then return to a boil for a minute or two; the sauce will not thicken properly until it actually simmers.
- Patty cupsUsually baked pastry cases, puff-paste shells of the kind sold today as frozen vol-au-vent or patty shells. Buttered toast, split biscuits or baked potatoes all serve the same purpose.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are the whole seasoning list, and the dish tastes flat without a firm hand on both. A grating of nutmeg or a dash of Worcestershire is period-appropriate if you want more.
Creamed meat on toast was a long-standing fixture of American home cooking, and it is often said that the familiar versions used dried salt beef — the chipped beef sold shaved in jars. This one substitutes fresh ground rump or round, which probably tells you something about the era: hand-cranked meat grinders were by then widely owned, and butchers would grind to order, so cooks could plausibly treat ground beef as an everyday ingredient rather than a sausage-making step. Dishes of this kind — quick, mild, thickened with milk, served in a pastry cup — seem to have done double duty as luncheon fare and as invalid cookery, where bland creamed food was generally thought easiest to digest.