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To Fry Chipped Beef

A dish of small pieces of dry beef fried with butter, flour, and milk.

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 ↓

To Fry Chipped Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Chip the dry beef into small pieces.

  2. Parboil the beef in cold water for 5 minutes, then drain.

Cook and serve

  1. In a pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Dredge the beef with flour until covered.

  3. Pour in the milk and stir until the mixture thickens.

  4. Serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Dry beef
Provides the main meat and savory flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and carries flavor through the pan.
Flour
Coats the beef and thickens the milk into a creamy sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid that the flour thickens into a creamy gravy.

The step that matters

Pour in the milk and stir until the mixture thickens. Stir the milk in steadily so the flour's starch disperses evenly. As the mixture heats, the starch granules swell and thicken the liquid. Adding milk all at once or not stirring can leave lumps.

“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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