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Buttered Beets
Boil 1 dozen small beets in plenty of water and when tender put into cold water, slip peeling off of them, cut them in thin slices and put in saucepan with 4 tablespoons Crisco, pinch of salt and little pepper. Add before they are quite hot 1 tablespoon vinegar.
A plain vegetable side that needs almost no translation, though the fat it calls for tells you exactly which book you are reading.
- Crisco, and the titleThe dish is called Buttered Beets but contains no butter: Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book was published to sell it. Four tablespoons of butter gives the flavour the name promises; a neutral oil or modern shortening reproduces the original more faithfully.
- Boil them whole and unpeeledThat is the hinge, even though the recipe only implies it. Leave the root tail and an inch of stem attached and do not cut into the beet before cooking, or the colour and sugar bleed into the water and you are left with pale, flat-tasting slices.
- TimingNo time is given. Small beets, roughly golf-ball to lemon size, take 30 to 45 minutes at a steady simmer; test with a skewer rather than the clock, since size varies more than the recipe admits.
- The cold-water plungeNot for texture but for handling. Once chilled the skins slip off under your thumbs. Wear gloves or accept stained hands for a day.
- Add the vinegar off the heatAdd the vinegar before they are fully hot -- The recipe says to add it "before they are quite hot", so it goes in as the slices warm through in the fat rather than into a hot pan. Vinegar cooked hard loses its brightness; stirred in early it stays sharp and keeps the sweetness in check.
- Quantity and yieldA dozen small beets is about 1.5 to 2 lb trimmed, serving four to six as a side. Cider or white wine vinegar suits it better than harsh distilled malt.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, which came on the American market in 1911; that is why a plainly named buttered vegetable turns up with four tablespoons of shortening in it and no butter at all. Such books were a common form of advertising in the period, handed out or sold cheaply so that a new industrial fat could enter the household through the front door of the recipe box rather than the grocer's shelf. The dish itself is much older than the fat: hot sliced beets finished with vinegar are a fixture of northern European cooking, where the root's keeping qualities made it a winter staple, and the acid is there as much to balance the beet's considerable sugar as to season it.