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Creamed Dried Beef

Creamed Dried Beef is a savory dish of sautéed dried beef in a thickened milk sauce served over toast.

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 Dried Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Make the creamed beef

  1. Sauté the dried beef in hot butter until it curls up.

  2. Pour in 1 pint of milk.

  3. Mix flour and cold water until smooth.

  4. Add the mixture to the milk and beef.

  5. Cook until the mixture thickens.

Serve

  1. Serve on toast.

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. Flour + buttertop 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).

Flour and butter 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

Dried beef
Provides the salty, savory meat flavor and the main body of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the sauce a creamy body.
Butter
Fat for sautéing the beef, adding richness and flavor.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing flour with cold water until smooth. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps, because its starch granules swell unevenly. Mixing it with cold water first disperses the starch so the sauce thickens smoothly.

“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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