Skip to main content
Main

Scrambled Eggs with Beef

A quick skillet dish of eggs scrambled with dried beef, butter, and lard, seasoned with sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,847 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Scrambled Eggs with Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat the butter and lard in a skillet over medium heat.

  2. Add the dried beef and cook for a few minutes, stirring to prevent burning.

Cook the eggs

  1. In a bowl, break the eggs and season with salt.

  2. Stir the eggs into the beef mixture and cook for a few minutes until set.

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

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

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Beef + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set into a soft structure as they cook, forming the body of the scramble.
Dried beef
Adds salty, savory flavor and a chewy texture that contrasts with the eggs.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor and helps keep the eggs from sticking to the pan.
Lard
Adds fat that carries flavor and helps the dried beef fry without burning.

The step that matters

Stirring the dried beef while it cooks. Finely chipped dried beef is thin and dries out quickly, so it can scorch in the fat. Stirring keeps the pieces moving and evenly cooked before the eggs go in.

“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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes