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Frizzle-Dizzle
2 ounces smoked dried beef 2 tablespoons butter 3 eggs 2 tablespoons grated cheese Dash of red pepper Remove all fat and gristle from the beef; tear into small pieces and cook slightly in the butter. Add the beaten eggs, cheese and red pepper; scramble and serve with crisp crackers.
A chafing-dish scramble of dried beef, eggs and cheese, meant to be cooked at the table over a spirit lamp. It comes together in under five minutes and punishes inattention.
- Smoked dried beefSold today as sliced dried beef in jars or vacuum packs, and it is very salty. Rinse and pat dry if you are sensitive to salt, and add no further seasoning until you have tasted.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not crushed chile flakes. A dash means roughly an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Grated cheeseThe recipe does not specify a kind; a dry cheese that grates well, such as Parmesan or a firm Cheddar, suits it. Two tablespoons is a small amount; it seasons rather than binds.
- HeatThe hinge of the dish. A chafing dish over a spirit lamp is gentle; a modern burner is not. Keep the pan low and pull it off the heat while the eggs are still glossy, since the cheese and residual heat will finish them.
- Order of operationsCook the beef only until it curls and the butter takes on colour. Frying it hard makes it leathery and it will not soften again once the eggs are in.
- YieldThree eggs and two ounces of beef serve two as a light supper or four as a savoury on crackers.
- ServingCrisp crackers would most likely be plain soda crackers or water biscuits. Have them ready before you start, as the eggs will not wait.
Chafing-dish cookery had a vogue in American households from the 1890s into the 1910s and 1920s, when a spirit-lamp pan on the sideboard let a hostess produce a hot dish without the kitchen, the range or the servant. Whole cookbooks and chapters were given over to it, and the repertoire ran to eggs, cheese, oysters, creamed shellfish and dried beef, which kept well and needed no butchering. The nonsense name fits the genre's playfulness: chafing-dish recipes were associated with late suppers, card parties and bachelor cooking, and titles like this one signalled informality more than they described anything. "Frizzle" is a long-standing English and American term for frying something thin until it shrivels and crisps at the edges, which is what the beef does in the butter here.