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Frizzled Beef (To every cupful of dried beef)
To every cupful of dried beef cut in thin slices, take one tablespoonful of hot butter, one cupful of scalded cream and one well-beaten egg. Put the beef in a sauce pan, pour one cupful of boiling water over it, and let stand on back of stove for ten minutes. Drain, add the butter and as soon as the beef is frizzled or curled up, add the cream and the egg. The egg should be well-beaten and the cream poured over it. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve at once. 1
A creamed chipped beef, thickened with egg rather than flour, and here intended as a sandwich filling. The whole dish turns on how the egg goes in.
- The hinge: keep the egg from scramblingBeat the egg, pour the scalded cream over it in a thin stream while whisking, then return the mixture to the pan off direct heat or over the lowest possible flame. Stirred gently it thickens to a light custard in a minute or two; boiled, it curdles into shreds and weeping liquid.
- Dried beef todayThe book means air-dried salt-cured beef sold in thin sheets, still available as jarred or packaged chipped beef. It is very salty, which is why the recipe soaks it first. Bresaola or thin-sliced pastrami will not behave the same way.
- The soak is not optionalThe cupful of boiling water and ten minutes on the back of the stove is a desalting step. Modern packaged chipped beef is at least as salty as the beef the book assumes, so keep it, drain well, and taste before adding any salt at all.
- "Scalded cream"Heat the cream until it steams and small bubbles form at the edge, around 180F, then take it off. Scalding was partly a keeping precaution in the days before reliable pasteurisation; here it also means the cream is hot enough to start thickening the egg.
- "Frizzled"Simply the beef sizzled in butter until the edges curl and darken slightly, a minute or so over medium heat. It is a texture and flavour step, not browning for its own sake, and it goes quickly once the beef is drained.
- MeasuresOne cupful of dried beef, loosely packed in thin slices, is roughly 2 ounces. The tablespoon of butter and cup of cream are the same as ours.
- Yield and servingEnough for about two servings. Serve at once, as the recipe directs, while hot.
Dried or "chipped" beef was one of the standard American pantry meats of the nineteenth century: lean beef salted, sometimes smoked, and dried hard, then shaved into papery slices that kept without ice. Cooks stretched it with milk, cream or eggs into creamed beef on toast, a breakfast and supper dish so common in institutional and army kitchens that it later acquired an unprintable military nickname. This version belongs to the more refined end of the tradition, thickening with egg and cream rather than a flour sauce, which gives a softer, custard-like filling. The soaking step is a reminder of how much salt was needed to preserve meat before home refrigeration was general.