Vintage Recipes - Archiving nostalgic recipes from cookbooks, handwritten notes, advertisements, etc
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So how did papaw tweak it?
Sorry for the delay.
There were a lot tbh. It ends up being almost a different dish.
He usually scaled things down for a smaller batch, but for big gatherings, he would do the full recipe with his tweaks.
First of the option of using ground beef rather than dried. For a long time, you couldn't get dried beef other than jerky (which is usually spiced), so he defaulted to ground chuck or sirloin.
Next, the milk gets switched for cream. However, in big batches, he would use 1/4 cream, and the rest milk. If using cream only, halve or even quarter the flour. Cream thickens enough by itself imo, so I tend to skip the flour when I do it with cream only.
He added mushrooms, typically canned. Now, you wouldn't think canned mushrooms would be better than fresh, and I'd normally agree. But for this, it actually works better. He'd do one can per pound of beef. I've done it with fresh mushrooms, but unless you use something like Portobello, where you get a ton of flavor added compared to the typical button mushrooms, it isn't worth it.
Add the pepper during browning.
Once the beef is browned, he'd do a generous splash of Worcestershire per pound. Not crazy, just a splash splash.
Once that's done, the dairy gets added and mixed through.
Then he'd do maybe a pinch or two of nutmeg per pound of beef, then a shot of dry vermouth per pound.
It thickens up really quick, but if you drop the temp as soon as the dairy goes in, and let it simmer a little longer, maybe fifteen to twenty, all the flavors get a bit more intense since the nutmeg, vermouth and worcestershire sauce get more time to open up and spread out. But you have to watch because if it gets too thick, it's not as easy to eat.
While he did toast sometimes, it was usually toasted English muffins. Everyone preferred the muffins unless it was sourdough bread though.
When I do it, I make my own English muffins, and I do them sourdough. It's an extra day of work, but I had the chance to do it like that for him before he died, and he said he wished he'd thought of that. From him, that was high praise. He did sourdough baking, but stayed to a handful of things, and never tried those.
There's a caveat, though. You really can't scale down past a full pound of beef, or it doesn't work right. I've tried, and he had tried, to get it small enough for two or three servings, but it's a matter of the liquids not thickening right. It either stays too runny until it's over cooked, or it's like glue.
Btw, the unofficial name for it in the Navy when he served was SOS, standing for shit on a shingle. And if you've ever had it, you know why it's called that lol. It looks like something you'd flush. But that flavor and texture is so damn good!