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Beets
The turnip blood-beet is considered the best, and next to that the long blood-beet.
Wash the beet well, and great care should be used not to prick the skin or break the little fibers about them; if broken, the beets will lose their color by boiling. Drop into boiling water, and boil five or six hours; if served hot, season with butter, pepper and salt; if cold, cover with vinegar.
A straightforward boiled beet, with one instruction that no longer holds and one that very much does.
- The boiling timeFive or six hours suits the enormous, woody, cellar-stored beets of a winter kitchen. Ordinary market beets of 2-3 inches across are tender in 30-45 minutes; large ones may take an hour and a quarter. Test with a skewer at the thickest point rather than by the clock.
- Do not cut the beetThis is the part worth keeping. Leave about an inch of stem and the whole taproot attached, and do not peel or pierce before cooking, or the pigment (betanin, which is water-soluble) bleeds into the pot and leaves the flesh pale and the water crimson.
- PeelingAfter boiling, drain and run under cold water; the skins, stem and root slip off between finger and thumb. Wear gloves or accept stained hands for a day.
- Turnip blood-beetAn older nurseryman's name for a round or turnip-shaped blood beet, as against the "long blood-beet," the tapered kind. Long-rooted and cylindrical sorts are still grown under names such as Long Blood Red and Cylindra.Ganz precise identification with any one modern variety is not possible.Text: Turnip blood-beet -- an older name for a round, turnip-shaped blood beet, as against the "long blood-beet," the tapered kind; long and cylindrical sorts are still grown under names such as Long Blood Red and Cylindra.").replace(the modern supermarket beetroot is the same broad group.",
- Serving hotButter, pepper and salt is the whole seasoning as written. Slice or quarter while warm; a spoonful of the cooking liquid reduced with the butter keeps them glossy.
- Serving cold"Cover with vinegar" means a straight pickle, and plain cider or malt vinegar is sharp on its own. A pinch of sugar and a bay leaf in the vinegar, poured over while the beets are still warm, gives the familiar pickled beet; they keep a week or two refrigerated.
- YieldA pound of untrimmed beets, roughly three medium roots, serves two to three as a side.
Beets reached the American table first as a root vegetable of the kitchen garden and only later as a sugar crop, and nineteenth-century seed catalogues distinguished between the flat "turnip-rooted" sorts, the globe "blood" beets named for their colour, and the long tapering kinds that stored well buried in sand. A book of this period assumes its reader may be working with roots pulled in autumn and kept in a root cellar through the winter, which would help explain why the boiling time reads so long: an old storage beet is dense and fibrous in a way that a young summer beet is not. The instruction not to break the skin or the fine rootlets is a piece of genuine kitchen observation still repeated today, and the two serving suggestions -- hot with butter, cold under vinegar -- remain among the commonest treatments of a boiled beet.