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Dried Beef

A fried mixture of dried beef, butter, flour, milk, and egg served on 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 ↓

Dried Beef

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a chafing dish.

  2. Add the dried beef and fry until brown.

  3. Mix the flour with a little cold milk, then stir it into the beef.

  4. Add the egg and mix well.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Dried beef
Provides the main savory flavor and salty, meaty bulk of the dish.
Butter
Fat that fries the beef, carrying flavor and encouraging browning.
Milk
Liquid that, combined with the flour, forms the creamy sauce base.
Flour
Starch that thickens the milk into a smooth, coating sauce.
Egg
Enriches the sauce and adds some thickening as its proteins set with heat.

The step that matters

Add the egg and mix well. Egg proteins set when heated, so the egg should be mixed in evenly and the mixture kept from boiling hard. Otherwise it can scramble into curds instead of enriching the sauce.

“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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