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Chipped Beef

A creamy sauce made with chipped beef, half cream, half milk, butter, and corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Place the chipped beef to cover the bottom of a dish.

  2. Heat water until hot, add the beef, then drain thoroughly.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, mix the cream and milk, then stir in the butter.

  2. Heat the mixture until just about to boil.

  3. Make a thin paste with the corn starch and stir it in slowly to avoid curdling.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Walnut + corntop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

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

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Beef + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,028 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

Chipped beef
Provides the main savory meat flavor and the body of the dish.
Half cream
Adds richness and creaminess to the sauce.
Half milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce with the cream.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded flavor.
Corn starch
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it heats.

The step that matters

Stirring in the corn starch paste. Adding the starch slowly, as a thin paste, helps it disperse evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps. Stirring as it goes keeps the dairy from curdling and separating under heat.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, cream, milk, butter, corn):

  1. Peanutfits better
  2. Lima beansfits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, cream, milk, butter, corn. 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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