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Fricassee of Dried Beef

A creamy dish of dried beef simmered in butter and milk, thickened with eggs and served over toast or fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Fricassee of Dried Beef

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in the milk over hot water.

  2. Add the chopped beef and cook for about 5 minutes.

  3. Slowly add the beaten eggs, stirring until the sauce thickens.

  4. Serve on toast or fried bread.

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried beef
Provides salty, savoury flavour and chewy texture in the sauce.
Eggs
Thicken the milk sauce as they set when gently heated, giving body to the fricassee.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the sauce that the eggs thicken.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and smooths the sauce.

The step that matters

Slowly add the beaten eggs, stirring until the sauce thickens. Eggs thicken by coagulating proteins when heated gently. Adding them slowly while stirring spreads the heat and keeps them from scrambling into lumps, which would leave the sauce grainy.

“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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