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Supper Dish of Dried Beef

A stew of thinly sliced dried beef simmered in milk and butter, thickened with a flour and cold milk slurry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Supper Dish of Dried Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Thinly slice the dried beef.

Make the stew

  1. Combine the beef, milk, and butter in a stew pan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Mix flour with cold milk to create a slurry.

  4. Stir the slurry into the beef mixture once boiling.

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. Milk + buttertop 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. 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

Dried beef
Provides the main meat flavor and chewy, salty texture in the stew.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a stew when mixed into a slurry and heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the stew and adds creaminess.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, rounding out the flavor of the stew.

The step that matters

Stir the slurry into the boiling mixture. Flour mixed with cold milk keeps it from clumping. Adding it to a boiling liquid lets the starch gelatinize and thicken evenly, so the stew does not end up lumpy or thin.

“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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