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Dried Beef

A fried dried beef dish cooked with butter and beaten eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Dried Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Slice the dried beef into thin pieces.

  2. Place the slices in a frying pan and cover with boiling water.

  3. Cook for 10 minutes, then drain and cut into small bits.

Cook with eggs

  1. Return the beef to the pan, add a little butter, and stir in 4 beaten eggs.

  2. Stir and toss the mixture for about 2 minutes.

  3. Serve in a covered dish.

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

Dried beef
Provides the main savoury flavour and chewy, meaty texture of the dish.
Eggs
Set as they cook, binding the beef into a soft, tender scramble.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the eggs stay moist and separate from the beef.

The step that matters

Cooking the beef in boiling water. Dried beef is very salty and tough, so simmering it first softens the meat and draws out excess salt. Draining afterwards removes that salt and the water, so the beef does not make the eggs watery or overly salty.

“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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