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Chipped Beef with Cheese

A skillet dish of dried beef, butter, sweet milk, cheese, and flour thickened with water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Chipped Beef with Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat.

  2. Add the dried beef and stir until heated through.

  3. Pour in the sweet milk and mix well.

  4. Stir in the grated cheese.

  5. Dissolve the flour in a little water and add to the mixture, stirring until thickened.

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. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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 savory meat base and salty flavor of the dish.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a creamy sauce.
Grated cheese
Melts into the milk to add richness and a savory, creamy texture.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, cohesive sauce when dissolved and stirred.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the skillet base before the other ingredients are added.

The step that matters

Dissolve the flour in water before adding. Flour added directly to hot liquid can clump. Dissolving it in a little cold water first creates a smooth slurry that thickens the sauce evenly when stirred 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.

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