Skip to main content
Main

Frizzled Beef

A thickened dried beef mixture cooked with butter, flour, and milk, served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Frizzled Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, cream together the butter and flour.

  2. Add the boiling milk (or water) and stir well; cook for several minutes.

  3. Stir in the dried beef and let it sit on low heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  4. If the mixture is too thick or salty, add a little more milk.

  5. Season with black pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted bread dipped in salted boiling water and buttered generously.

  2. Garnish with hot hard-boiled eggs if desired.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and adds richness to the creamed base.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce that clings to the beef.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it body and a mild, creamy flavor.
Dried beef
Supplies the salty, savory meat flavor that defines the dish.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling milk to the flour and butter. Stirring the liquid in well while it is hot keeps the flour from forming lumps, and cooking it for several minutes lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce fully.

“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.

More frizzled beef recipes

and Eggs 3 See all 44 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes