Boil red beets until tender; skin and cut into thin slices. Sprinkle with salt, whole pepper, whole cloves, 2 bay-leaves and mix with wine vinegar. Let stand. Serve the next day.
A pickled beet salad with no quantities given, which is normal for this kind of one-line entry. The proportions are yours to set; the only fixed rule is the overnight rest.
- The hingeThe 24-hour stand is the recipe. The whole spices and bay need that long to move into the beets, and the vinegar needs time to sweeten against the beet sugars. Served the same day it tastes like raw vinegar.
- Working quantitiesFor about 2 lb of cooked beets, roughly 1/2 cup wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon salt, a dozen peppercorns, 6 cloves and the 2 bay-leaves. Enough for 4 to 6 as a side.
- Whole spices, not groundThe original specifies whole pepper and whole cloves deliberately. Ground clove in particular turns the beets muddy and medicinal; whole cloves perfume the liquid and can be fished out.
- Boiling the beetsLeave an inch of stem and the root tail on and do not peel before cooking, or the colour bleeds into the water. Medium beets take 35 to 50 minutes; the skins slip off under cold water.
- Wine vinegarRed wine vinegar is the obvious reading and keeps the colour. Modern wine vinegars run around 6 to 7 percent acidity, so taste and cut with a little water if it bites.
- Not a preserveThis is a refrigerator salad, not canned pickles. Keep it covered and cold and eat within about a week.
- ServingDrain off most of the spiced vinegar before serving and a little oil is a common Swiss finish, though the recipe does not call for it.
Beet salad dressed with vinegar and bay is standard everyday fare across German-speaking Switzerland and southern Germany, where Randensalat (Swiss German uses Randen rather than the German Rote Rüben) appears on menus beside carrot and celeriac salads as one of a plate of raw and cooked vegetable salads. The clove-and-bay treatment marks it as a close relative of the pickled beets kept in crocks through the winter; the difference is only that this batch is meant to be eaten in a day or two rather than stored for months. Books like this one, which set out a dish a day from a different country, leaned on exactly this sort of short, unambiguous national dish, and the instruction to serve it the next day suggests, though we cannot know for certain, a cook working a day ahead of the table.