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Dried Beef and Eggs

A dish of melted butter, chipped beef, eggs, milk, pepper, salt, and optional lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 and Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a chafing dish.

  2. Add the chipped beef and cover for 3 minutes.

  3. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the milk.

  4. Once the beef is hot, stir in the egg mixture, pepper, and salt continuously from the bottom.

  5. Add finely chopped lettuce if desired.

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. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set into soft curds that bind with the beef and give the dish its body.
Butter
Fats the pan and carries flavor, keeping the beef and eggs from sticking.
Chipped beef
Provides salty, savory meat flavor that the eggs carry throughout the dish.
Milk
Thins the beaten eggs slightly, keeping the scramble moist and tender.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture continuously from the bottom. Eggs cook quickly on contact with hot metal. Constant stirring keeps curds small and moist, while letting them sit leads to dry, rubbery, unevenly set eggs.

Swap the lettuce

The recipe marks lettuce as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, beef, egg, milk, pepper):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, beef, egg, milk, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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