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Smoked Beef with Cream
Place the finely minced beef in a stewpan with a lump of butter, cooking it for two minutes, and moisten slightly with a little cream, and add two tablespoonfuls of bechamel sauce, and serve as soon as it boils up.
A two-minute pan dish that assumes a cook with bechamel already standing on the stove. The whole thing hinges on the salt in the beef, which is far more variable now than the recipe's silence suggests.
- What "smoked beef" means hereAlmost certainly the dried, salt-cured and lightly smoked beef sliced paper-thin that is sold in the United States as chipped or dried beef, still found in jars or shrink-wrapped packets in the deli case. It is not smoked brisket or pastrami, and substituting either changes the dish entirely.
- Deal with the salt firstModern packaged dried beef runs very salty. Taste a shred raw; if it stings, cover the beef with hot water or milk for a few minutes, drain and pat dry before it goes near the butter. Otherwise the cream carries the salt straight through and there is no fixing it afterward.
- "Finely minced" is not groundMost likely finely chopped or shredded by hand rather than put through a grinder. Stack the slices, roll them, and cut across into ribbons.
- Two minutes in butter, no moreThe beef is already cured and ready to eat. The butter stage is to warm it and take the raw edge off the cure; past a couple of minutes over moderate heat the shreds toughen and curl into leather.
- BechamelTwo tablespoons of a standard milk-and-white-roux sauce. A professional kitchen would have had bechamel already made and standing; at home, a tablespoon of butter cooked with a tablespoon of flour and whisked with about a cup of milk gives you far more than needed, and the surplus keeps a day or two refrigerated.
- "Serve as soon as it boils up"One rolling bubble and it comes off. A cream sauce held at a boil with salty beef in it will tighten and can break; the instruction is a stopping point, not a cooking time.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. Roughly 4 oz of beef, 1 tablespoon butter, 2 to 3 tablespoons cream and the 2 tablespoons of bechamel makes two modest servings — a breakfast or supper portion over toast, a baked potato or rice.
- StewpanAny small heavy saucepan or a low-sided sauteuse. Nothing thin, or the milk solids in the sauce will catch.
Dried beef in cream sauce is one of the oldest survivals of the salt-cellar era on American menus: beef cured and dried so it would keep without ice, then reconstituted in fat and milk to soften both texture and cure. By the 1890s, when Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms, it was standard hotel breakfast and supper-room fare, and it appears in his book among the quick items that a waiter or a night cook could turn out in minutes. What marks it as a hotel recipe rather than a domestic one is the bechamel, a sauce of the professional kitchen's repertoire. The same dish went on to a long second life in the United States Army, which served it over toast under a name the printed menus preferred not to spell out.