Homage to Breakfast in the EDF - Cream Chipped Beef

I saved the best for last, creamed chipped beef on toast. I'm not sure when I was first introduced to this comfy delight. It may have been in my childhood, or certainly at Navy Boot Camp in 1965. The Armed Forces Recipe Service version (AFRS card L052) is a mixture of salty and creamy, but remains otherwise boring. That said, I don't remember leftovers in the mess.

This breakfast dish wasn't really any harder than minced beef or creamed beef, but it had a few more steps and ingredients in it. Various modifications, always written on the back of the recipe card, and signed by the Food Service Officer, included different spices, or soaking the beef to remove some of the salt, or 'frizzling' the beef to make it a bit more tender. Chipped Beef even made it to the Wardroom.

Now, when I asked my wife to make this, she hunted up a recipe that was in a print ad for Armour Dried Beef. It included cream cheese and hard-boiled eggs.The result was much richer. Linda reduced the amount of cheese and eggs by half and made it even better. The recipe we use, is the one I am including. I hope you give it a try, if you are among those who love this true comfort food.

I've done some limited research into the origins of this dish. One of the more believable Is that Native Americans introduced settlers to dried meat, aka jerky, and the settlers softened it and added it to a white sauce. White sauce is simply butter, flour, milk, salt, and pepper. I'm sure that the early Americans didn't know their white sauce had delusions of grandeur and would later be known as Bechamel, one of the five mother sauces. There are a number of alternative suggestions as to the source of creamed chipped beef, but they all end with a thoroughly American dish.

No matter where it comes from, or how you make it, Creamed Chipped Beef belongs on your breakfast table, whether on toast, biscuit, rice, or noodles. Bon Appetit.

See you next week. The subject will be the single food item that provides most of the daily nutrition for 60% of the world's population.