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Frizzled Beef for Breakfast

A quick sauté of thinly shaved smoked beef in butter, cream, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Frizzled Beef for Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Brown the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold milk. Add the cream or milk and the flour mixture to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the smoked beef and let it come to a boil.

  2. Serve immediately.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

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

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Butter
Browning the butter adds a nutty aroma and flavor to the sauce.
Cream or milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the flour thickens.
Flour
Thickens the cream or milk into a smooth sauce.
Smoked beef
Provides the salty, smoky meat flavor that the sauce carries.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour mixed directly into hot liquid clumps. Mixing it first with a little cold milk creates a smooth slurry that thickens the sauce evenly when added to the saucepan.

“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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