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Buttered Beets
Wash and scrub beets with a vegetable brush, being careful not to break the skin. Cook in boiling water to cover (about an hour for small young beets and old beets, until tender). Drain and rub off the skins at once; slice, sprinkle with salt and pepper and dot over with bits of butter. Serve hot.
A plain boiled-beet dish that depends almost entirely on keeping the skins intact until the beets are cooked. A few notes bring the timings and quantities into line with modern practice.
- Don't cut the beetsThe instruction not to break the skin is the hinge of the recipe. Leave an inch of stem and the whole root tail attached; any nick and the colour and sugar bleed into the water, leaving pale, watery beets.
- Real timingsAn hour is right for large, mature beets. Small young beets of two inches or less are tender in 25-35 minutes. Test with a skewer at the thickest point rather than by the clock.
- Salt the waterThe original salts only at the end. A well-salted cooking water seasons the flesh through, and the beets can then take a lighter hand with salt at the table.
- Slipping the skins"At once" matters: the skins slide off under a little cold running water while the beets are still hot, and grip stubbornly once cooled. Wear gloves or accept stained hands for a day.
- Butter quantityNo amount is given. Roughly 2 tablespoons for 2 lb of beets, cut into small bits so it melts on contact and coats the slices as they are turned.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of untrimmed beets serves four as a side dish; they lose noticeable weight in trimming and peeling.
- Beet greensIf the tops came attached and are fresh, they cook in minutes like chard. Recipes for cooked beet greens appear in cookbooks of the period.
Beets were an autumn and winter staple in American kitchens because they store well in a cool cellar for months. Boiling whole and unbroken, then rubbing off the skins, was the standard treatment in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks; the caution about the skin appears again and again in the period, and the alternative preparations were usually pickling in vinegar or the sweet-sour dressing that came to be called Harvard beets. The beet itself is a comparatively late arrival as a root vegetable, generally traced to European garden selection in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from leafy chard-like ancestors, with the sugar beet developed later from the same species.