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Creamed Chipped Beef

Creamed Chipped Beef is a sauce of butter, flour, cream, and water served over chipped beef.

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

Creamed Chipped Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove the coarse threads from the edges of the beef.

  2. Cover the beef with boiling water.

  3. Let the beef sit on the back of the stove to keep hot.

  4. Drain the beef.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Stir the drained beef into the sauce.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan.

  3. Cook the flour in the melted butter until frothy.

  4. Gradually stir in the cream and diluted water.

  5. Stir and cook until the sauce boils.

  6. Serve immediately with baked potatoes.

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

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

  4. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 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

Chipped beef
Provides the salty, savoury meat that forms the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour, and forms the base for the flour roux.
Flour
Cooked in butter, its starch thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the thickened sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the cream and diluted water. Adding liquid slowly to the hot butter and flour mixture while stirring keeps the starch dispersed, preventing lumps. Cooking until the sauce boils lets the starch swell fully and thicken it.

“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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