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Beets in Drawn Butter
Wash the small new beets and cook in boiling salted water until tender. Drain and cover with cold water. Rub off the skins and slice them or cut them in cubes. Reheat them in
A simple summer vegetable dish whose text breaks off mid-sentence; the missing clause is the drawn butter sauce the title promises. The technique itself is complete enough to work from.
- Drawn butter is not melted butterIn American cookbooks of this period drawn butter means a light white sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour, thinned with about a cup of hot water or beet cooking liquid, seasoned with salt and pepper, and finished with another lump of butter off the heat. Melted butter alone will not coat the beets the way the recipe intends.
- Where the text stops"Reheat them in" is the start of the direction to warm the sliced beets through in the finished sauce. Do it over low heat for two or three minutes only, long enough to heat the beets without letting the sauce boil down and break.
- Small new beetsThese are the thinning-sized roots of early summer, about 1 to 2 inches across, sold in bunches with the tops on. Leave an inch of stem and the root tail intact so they do not bleed out into the water; larger storage beets will work but need 40 to 60 minutes rather than 20 to 30.
- The cold water stepPlunging into cold water is chiefly for handling comfort: it cools the outside enough to rub the skins off by hand. They slip most easily while the beets are still warm through, so it is worth peeling them soon after draining.
- Salted waterSalt the cooking water lightly, on the order of a tablespoon per gallon. Beets boiled in their skins take up relatively little of it, so the sauce will do most of the seasoning.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, a bunch of small beets, about 1 1/2 pounds untrimmed, would serve about four as a side dish with roughly a cup of sauce.
- The greensThe tops that come attached are worth keeping. Wash them well and cook them like chard while the roots boil.
Drawn butter sauce was the workhorse of nineteenth-century American cooking, ladled over boiled fish, asparagus, cauliflower and, as here, beets. The name is older than the flour-thickened version: it is generally traced to butter drawn or melted with a little water. By the time collections like this one appeared, the floured version had won in the United States, and it functioned as the default plain sauce a cook could produce in five minutes from pantry staples. The recipe carries a straightforward seasonal cue. Beets sown in spring reach thinning size in early summer, and small tender roots were treated as a distinct vegetable from the coarse keepers that would come out of the ground in autumn and go into the root cellar.