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Pickled Beets
Prepare beets as for Buttered Beets (see Page 143). Cut them in slices and lay them in a stone or glass jar. Allow one slice of onion for each beet, one tablespoon grated horseradish, eight cloves and vinegar enough to cover. Let stand twenty-four hours and they will be ready for use. Beets thus prepared will not keep longer than a week. If vinegar is too strong, dilute with one-fourth part cold water. cover.
A quick refrigerator pickle rather than a preserve: the beets are already cooked, and the vinegar only has to flavour them overnight. The one thing to respect is the book's own warning about keeping time.
- The cross-reference"Prepare beets as for Buttered Beets" sends you back to the earlier recipe. The usual method of the period was to cook beets whole and unpeeled, with some stem left on, then slip off the skins once tender, on the principle that piercing them lets the colour bleed into the water.
- A stone or glass jarStoneware crocks and glass canning jars were the neutral vessels of the period. Any non-reactive container works; avoid aluminium, cast iron and unlined copper, which vinegar will attack and which will dull the colour.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period was not standardised and varied in strength, which is why the recipe offers the dilution. Standard supermarket cider or white vinegar is 5 percent acidity and rarely needs the quarter-part water; taste before diluting.
- HorseradishA tablespoon of freshly grated root is meant. Jarred prepared horseradish already contains vinegar and salt and is milder, so use closer to two tablespoons and expect a gentler result.
- ClovesEight whole cloves, not ground. They are assertive in a cold pickle; fish them out after a day or two if the flavour starts to dominate.
- SaltThe recipe adds no salt of its own. Season the vinegar lightly, and a teaspoon of sugar per cup will round off the sharpness without making it a sweet pickle.
- KeepingThe book is right that these will not last: this is a lightly acidified fresh vegetable, not a canned one. Keep the jar in the refrigerator and eat within a week. Do not seal it in jars and store it at room temperature.
- YieldMeasured per beet rather than by volume, so scale to whatever you have: one slice of onion per beet, eight cloves, a tablespoon of horseradish and vinegar enough to cover.
Pickled beets belong to the enormous nineteenth-century category of relishes meant to sharpen a plate of cold meat, and beets were lifted from the ground in autumn and were among the cheapest roots in the cellar. What sets this version apart from the long-boiled, sealed spiced beets of the canning chapters is that it is deliberately temporary -- the author tells you outright that it will not keep longer than a week -- which marks it as a fresh table pickle rather than a preserve. The onion, horseradish and clove combination was common for cold beetroot in Northern European and American cooking, and horseradish was a kitchen-garden plant that some households grated from their own root. 52 Sunday Dinners was built around complete weekly menus, which explains the cross-reference to Buttered Beets on another page: the book expects you to be reading it as a system rather than a collection of independent recipes.