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Creamed Dried Beef
1/4 pound dried beef 2 tablespoons Mazola 1 pint milk 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Pepper and salt to taste Coarsely shred the dried beef. Scald it and place in a small frying pan with the Mazola. Cook two or three minutes until it looks dry. Add the cornstarch and gradually the milk. Stir until boiling, season, and serve on toast, on split tea biscuits or with mashed or baked potatoes.
A corn-products advertising recipe of the 1910s-20s, and a sound one: cornstarch rather than a flour roux gives a glossy sauce that thickens fast. A few notes on the ingredients and the one step people skip.
- Scalding the beefPouring boiling water over the shredded beef and draining it is the hinge of the recipe. Old-style chipped beef was heavily salted for keeping; without the scald the finished sauce is inedibly salty. Modern deli-style dried beef is milder but still salty enough to warrant a brief rinse in hot water, and you should salt only at the very end, if at all.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. Any neutral oil works; two tablespoons of butter is the more common modern choice and browns the beef better.
- Argo or Kingsford's cornstarchPlain cornstarch, unchanged. Two tablespoons to a pint of milk gives a fairly thick, spoonable sauce. The recipe's order -- dry starch into the oil and beef, then the milk gradually -- disperses the grains in fat much as a roux does; if you prefer, whisk the starch into a little of the cold milk first and stir that in.
- Dried beef todaySold in small jars or thin-sliced packets, usually labeled chipped or dried beef. A quarter pound is about 4 oz, enough for four servings over toast.
- Cook it just to the boilCornstarch reaches full thickness the moment it boils and begins to thin again if held at a hard simmer. Stir until it bubbles, hold thirty seconds to cook out the raw starch taste, then pull it off the heat.
- PepperBe generous. With the salt already coming from the beef, black pepper is what carries the dish; a grating of nutmeg is a traditional addition in the same family of white sauces.
- YieldServes three to four over toast. It thickens further as it stands, so loosen with a splash of milk if it sits before serving.
Creamed dried beef belongs to the long American tradition of stretching a small amount of cured meat across a lot of milk and starch, and it turns up in breakfast and chafing-dish chapters throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Air-dried salt beef was a keeping meat, sliced paper-thin, and a quarter pound was expected to feed a family. This particular version comes from a promotional cookbook issued by the makers of Mazola oil and Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, which explains why both brands are named in a recipe of five ingredients; corn-milling companies published dozens of such booklets to move households from lard and flour toward corn oil and cornstarch. The dish is best known now under the army slang name it acquired in the twentieth century, though the recipe long predates that.