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New Beets
Peel hot cooked beets, cut into slices, and toss about for 3 or 4 minutes in saucepan which contains 3 tablespoons Crisco to which has been added 1 teaspoon plain vinegar, or a few drops of tarragon, 2 cloves, and 1 teaspoon sugar.
A quick warm dressing for beets that are already cooked, from a cookbook written to promote Crisco. Nothing here is difficult; the only real variable is the fat.
- CriscoIn this book Crisco is the point of the exercise: hydrogenated vegetable shortening, then a novelty. It contributes nothing but fat here, so 3 tablespoons of butter or a mild oil will do the same job.
- Start with cooked beetsThe recipe assumes you already have hot boiled or roasted beets. Depending on size, allow roughly 30-60 minutes of simmering, or about an hour roasted in a hot oven; the skins slip off under a paper towel while they are still warm.
- The clovesTwo whole cloves in three tablespoons of fat is assertive. Add them to the pan first so they perfume the fat, and fish them out before serving rather than leaving them in the dish.
- Vinegar or tarragon"Plain vinegar" means ordinary white or cider vinegar. The alternative is tarragon vinegar, not fresh tarragon the "few drops" makes sense only for a liquid. Either way the acid is what keeps the sugar from reading as dessert.
- Three or four minutes is rightThis is a glaze, not further cooking. Keep the heat moderate and toss until the slices are coated and glossy; longer and the sugar starts to catch and the beets go soft at the edges.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantity of beets and no yield; three tablespoons of fat will dress roughly a pound or so.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, one of a run of promotional cookbooks issued after Crisco was introduced in 1911; the recipes are built around the product, which is why a plain buttered beet dish is buttered with shortening instead. The dressing itself is much older than the book: hot beets tossed with fat, a little sugar and a little vinegar is a common nineteenth-century Anglo-American treatment, often said to descend from the sweet-sour spiced sauces that European cooks put on root vegetables. Cloves in particular turn up constantly in older beet and pickled-beet recipes, where they stand in for the whole warm-spice cupboard. The book's structure a dinner planned for every day of the year was a common format at the time, aimed at the middle-class housekeeper expected to produce a different table each evening without a menu of her own devising.