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Creamed Beets
Boil 8 medium-sized beets until tender, then remove from saucepan and place them in cold water, rub skins off carefully with hands, cut in 1/2 inch cubes. Make a sauce of 2 tablespoons Crisco creamed with 2 tablespoons flour and 1/2 cup water in which beets were boiled 2 tablespoons cream, 2 tablespoons vinegar, 2 teaspoons sugar, salt and pepper to taste. Pour sauce over hot beets and serve in hot dish.
A straightforward sweet-sour beet dish from a Crisco-sponsored menu book. The only real technical point is the sauce, which is a small roux thinned with beet water rather than milk.
- Crisco means shorteningCrisco was vegetable shortening, the product this book was written to sell. Butter works at the same measure and tastes better here; a neutral oil is fine but the sauce will be slightly thinner.
- Cook the roux"Creamed with flour" means rubbed to a paste. Cook the fat and flour together for a minute or two before adding liquid, or the sauce carries a raw-flour taste that the vinegar will not hide.
- The liquid is tightTwo tablespoons each of fat and flour will seize with only half a cup of beet water plus two of cream. Have another half cup of the cooking liquid at hand and add it until the sauce coats a spoon.
- Save the beet waterReserve it before you drain the pot. It carries most of the colour and sweetness, and the recipe depends on it rather than milk or stock.
- Boiling timesMedium beets, left whole with an inch of stem and the root tail intact, take 40 to 60 minutes at a simmer. Cut them and they bleed out pale. Roasting at 400F in foil for about an hour gives a deeper flavour if you would rather not boil.
- CreamPeriod "cream" was often what we would call light cream or half-and-half. Either works; heavy cream makes a richer sauce that can take a little more vinegar.
- Balance at the endTwo tablespoons of vinegar to two teaspoons of sugar is a sharp ratio, and the recipe does not say what kind of vinegar. Add the vinegar off the heat and taste before committing to all of it.
- YieldEight medium beets serve four to six as a side dish. Serve hot, as directed; the sauce dulls and thickens badly as it cools.
This comes from one of the menu-a-day books published in the 1910s to promote Crisco, which Procter & Gamble had introduced in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable shortening. Such books were sold cheaply or given away, and the recipes in them routinely call for the product by name, which is why an otherwise ordinary beet dish specifies a brand of fat rather than butter or drippings. The dish itself belongs to the family of sweet-sour American beet preparations, of which Harvard beets are the best-known relative. Its placement in the book reflects that structure, where dishes are grouped by the day's menu rather than by their principal ingredient.