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Corned Beef Creamed
Slice any remnants of cold corned beef in thin pieces to make two cups. Make two cups white sauce No. 8 (see page 68) Cook until smooth and thickened, then add the two cups of beef.
Cook very slowly together for fifteen minutes.
A plain use-up dish that depends almost entirely on how thin you slice the beef and how gently you hold the sauce. Two points need attention: the missing sauce recipe and the fifteen-minute simmer.
- White sauce No. 8The cross-reference is to page 68, which this page does not reproduce, so the exact proportions are unknown. A medium white sauce of this era runs about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, which should give roughly the consistency a creamed-meat dish wants.
- Slice thin, and across the grainCorned beef, brisket especially, is tough along the grain. Cut it into sheets no thicker than a coin, cutting across the muscle fibres, or the fifteen minutes in sauce will not soften it.
- The fifteen minutes is for flavour, not cookingThe beef is already fully cooked. The slow simmer is there to let salt and spice from the corning move into the sauce. Keep it below a bubble; a boil will make the sauce grainy and can toughen the meat further.
- Salt last, if at allCorned beef carries a great deal of salt and it will migrate into the milk. Season the white sauce lightly or not at all, and taste only after the beef has had its time in it.
- Milk and salty meatA milk sauce held over direct heat with salty meat in it will catch on the bottom. Use a heavy pan, stir every few minutes, or set the pan over simmering water.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of beef plus two cups of sauce gives about four cups of finished creamed beef, enough for three to four. It suits toast, split baking-powder biscuits or boiled potatoes; a grating of nutmeg or black pepper and a little chopped parsley would not be out of place.
Books of "left overs" were a small publishing genre in the United States from roughly the 1890s through the First World War, when household economy was treated as a skill to be taught rather than a hardship to be endured. Creaming was the workhorse technique of that literature: a white sauce turned any cold cooked protein back into a hot dish, and the same formula served chipped beef, salmon, hard-boiled eggs and chicken. Corned beef was an especially reliable candidate because a boiled brisket is large by nature and rarely finished at one meal. The name is older than the tin: "corn" once meant a grain or coarse particle, and corned beef is simply beef cured with grains of coarse salt, a usage traced back well before refrigeration made the curing optional.