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Frizzled Beef

A dish of sliced dried beef cooked with butter, milk, and flour to a creamy consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Frizzled Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Place the sliced beef in a frying pan and cover with cold water.

  2. Heat over moderate heat until steaming, then pour off the water.

  3. Return the beef to the pan and heat gently, stirring constantly until somewhat dry.

Add butter and milk

  1. Add 4 tablespoons of butter and cook until the beef curls and is slightly crisp.

  2. Pour in 1 cup of milk for dressing.

  3. In a small bowl, moisten ½ tablespoon of flour with a little cold milk until smooth.

  4. Add the flour mixture to the hot milk in the pan and stir until thickened, about the consistency of cream.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot platter.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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 main savory flavor and the chewy, crisp-edged texture once dried and fried.
Butter
Fat that crisps the beef edges and adds richness to the dish.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that becomes the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the milk into a cream-like sauce when stirred in and heated.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the milk. Flour must be smoothed in cold milk first so it does not lump; heating it in the hot milk while stirring lets starch granules swell evenly and thicken the sauce.

“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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