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Frizzled Beef

A dish of browned dried beef cooked with butter, lard, milk, and a flour paste.

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 ↓

Frizzled Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. In a pan, heat the butter and lard over medium heat.

  2. Add the chipped, dried beef and fry for 3 minutes.

  3. Pour the milk over the beef and bring to a boil.

Thicken and finish

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour with a little cold water to make a smooth paste.

  2. Stir in the flour mixture and boil for 2 minutes, stirring constantly.

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

Chipped dried beef
Provides the main savory flavor and meaty texture of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the fat used for frying the beef.
Lard
Gives the beef a rich fat for frying and helps it crisp at the edges.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that gives the dish its creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells and sets when boiled.

The step that matters

Stir the flour paste in while the milk boils. Flour mixed smoothly with cold water and stirred in constantly disperses evenly, so the starch thickens the milk without forming lumps. Stopping the stirring lets the flour clump and settle on the bottom of the pan.

“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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