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Creamed Dried Beef
One-half pound of dried beef; one tablespoon of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one-half pint of milk; two eggs; pepper to taste. Place the butter in a small frying or stewpan, add the milk and, when hot, the beef shredded. Cook three minutes. Rub the flour smooth in a little cold milk, add a dash of pepper and stir into the beef. As soon as it thickens draw the pan back, add the well beaten eggs and serve at once. The hot gravy will cook the eggs sufficiently.
A one-pan chipped beef in cream sauce, built backwards from the way most cooks would do it now. The order of operations and the salt of the beef are the two things worth attention.
- Half a pint of milkThat is one cup (8 fl oz) in US measure. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour it makes a fairly loose sauce, closer to a thin gravy than the stiff creamed beef sold on diner menus.
- Dried beef todaySold as chipped or sliced dried beef, usually in a jar or a small vacuum pack, salt-cured and paper-thin. Half a pound is a large amount by modern packaging; two 4-5 oz jars will do it. Nothing else in the recipe is salted, and for good reason.
- Tame the salt firstDried beef is heavily salt-cured and can overwhelm a small quantity of sauce. Cover the shredded beef with hot water for a minute or two, drain and press dry before it goes into the milk, then taste the finished sauce before adding any salt at all.
- The flour goes in lateModern practice is to cook butter and flour together into a roux first. Here the flour is slaked in cold milk and stirred in at the end, so keep whisking as it comes back to a simmer and give it a full minute of bubbling to lose the raw-starch taste.
- The eggs are the hingeTwo beaten eggs stirred into roughly a cup of thickened sauce off the heat will thicken it further but will not reliably reach a temperature that pasteurises them. If that matters to you, return the pan to very low heat and stir until the mixture reaches 160F, or use pasteurised eggs; do not let it boil, or the eggs will curdle into threads.
- Three minutes means three minutesDried beef is already cured and ready to eat. Longer simmering only makes it stringy and draws more salt into the sauce.
- Yield and servingServes two generously, three at a pinch. The recipe gives no serving direction, but creamed beef is commonly served over buttered toast, split biscuits or baked potatoes, and it wants something of the kind: on its own it is very rich and very salty.
Dried beef was one of the last survivals of the pre-refrigeration larder to hold a place in twentieth-century home cooking: lean beef, usually from the round, salt-cured and air-dried so it kept without ice, then shaved thin. Creaming it in a milk sauce was a common domestic solution to a very salty preserved meat, stretching a small quantity of expensive protein across a family breakfast or a Sunday supper. The Butterick Cook Book, issued around 1911 by the pattern company that also published The Delineator, was aimed squarely at that kind of household economy, and its meat chapter is full of dishes that make half a pound go around a table. Some versions, like this one, thicken with beaten eggs as well as flour; the dish survives more familiarly as plain flour-and-milk creamed beef on toast, known in military mess halls by a name that is not printable here.