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Creamed Beef

Creamed Beef is a dish of sliced beef cooked in butter, milk, and flour, seasoned with pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Slice the beef into thin pieces.

  2. Melt the butter in a frying pan.

  3. Add the beef and stir until it begins to curl.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour in the milk and bring to a boil.

  2. Mix the flour with 3 tablespoons of milk until smooth, then stir it into the boiling mixture.

  3. Season with pepper, boil once, and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main savory, meaty flavor and chewy texture of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the beef brown slightly as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and gives it a creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells when heated, turning the liquid into a sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the boiling milk. Flour added dry clumps easily, so mixing it smooth with cold milk first lets the starch disperse. Stirring it into boiling liquid then swells the starch granules, which thickens the sauce evenly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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