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Macaroni with Smoked Beef
Cook a little smoked beef in one tablespoonful of hot butter two or three minutes, add one-half tablespoonful of flour and a cup of milk, and stir often until it thickens. Add to this one and onehalf cups of cold macaroni. Cook together until well heated. Serve on well-buttered hot toast.
A creamed chipped beef variation built on yesterday's macaroni, and it comes together in about ten minutes. The main adjustments are salt and sauce consistency.
- "Smoked beef" means dried beefThis is the thin-sliced cured product sold as chipped or dried beef (salted and lightly smoked in the curing), not barbecued brisket. Two to three ounces suits this quantity; tear it into rough shreds rather than chopping.
- Control the saltDried beef of this period was probably saltier than the jarred product sold now, and even the modern version is assertive. Taste the finished sauce before adding any salt at all; if your beef is very salty, cover it with hot water for a minute and pat it dry before frying.
- Cook the flour before the milkThe half tablespoon of flour goes into the buttered beef and should sizzle for a good minute before the milk goes in. Add the milk warm and in stages, stirring, or the sauce will be lumpy and taste of raw starch.
- Sauce proportionsOne tablespoon butter, half a tablespoon flour and a cup of milk is a thin white sauce by design — it has to loosen a mass of cold, set macaroni. It will look too runny before the pasta goes in and tighten as it heats.
- Cold macaroni behaves differentlyRefrigerated pasta is firm and clumped; break it apart with your fingers before it goes in the pan. Reheat gently over medium-low heat, about three to four minutes, just to steam it through — hard boiling will fray the pasta and split nothing but your patience.
- YieldServes two as a light supper, on two thick slices of buttered toast each. A grating of black pepper, a little dry mustard, or a spoonful of grated cheese is well within the spirit of the dish.
Creamed dried beef on toast was one of the standard American cheap suppers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: shelf-stable cured beef, a flour-and-milk sauce, and bread to carry it. Its later army mess-hall reputation, and the unprintable nickname that went with it, came from exactly this formula.