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Stuffed Beets
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 6 beets 2 green peppers 2 tablespoonfuls breadcrumbs 1/2 teaspoonful onion juice Salt and pepper to taste Watercress Select 6 smooth even-sized beets and boil in boiling salted water until tender. Peel, remove root end and remove center, leaving shell about half inch thick. Remove stems and seeds from peppers; cover peppers with boiling water ten minutes. Dice them with scooped out beet, add Crisco, breadcrumbs, and seasonings. Mix and divide into beet shells, dot with Crisco and bake in moderate oven twenty minutes. Serve garnished with watercress. Sufficient for six beets.
A straightforward stuffed-vegetable dish from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook. Nothing here is difficult, but the original assumes you know how long a beet takes and what a moderate oven is.
- Moderate oven350F. Twenty minutes is enough to heat the filling through and crisp the crumbs, since everything going into the shells is already cooked.
- Boiling the beetsNo time is given. Medium beets, boiled whole with skins and an inch of stem left on to stop them bleeding, take 40 to 60 minutes; large ones can take longer. Test with a skewer rather than a clock. The skins slip off under cold running water.
- Hollowing the shellsA melon baller or a grapefruit spoon works better than a knife. Half an inch of wall sounds thick but a thinner shell collapses when you fill it. Cut a thin slice off the base if the beets will not sit upright.
- CriscoThis is an advertising cookbook and Crisco appears in nearly every recipe. Any solid fat or a couple of tablespoons of butter or oil does the same job; butter improves the flavour of the crumb topping.
- Onion juiceAn early-century shortcut: a halved onion pressed against a grater or squeezed in a cloth. A small onion will give you at least the half teaspoon called for, and finely grated onion works in its place.
- The green peppersTen minutes under boiling water softens them; drain well before dicing or the filling turns watery.
- SeasoningBeet and bread crumbs together are sweet and flat. Be generous with salt and pepper, and a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice in the filling brings the whole thing into focus.
- YieldSix stuffed beets, one apiece as a side dish. They can be filled several hours ahead and baked at the last minute.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, which explains why two tablespoonfuls of it appear in a dish of baked beets. The stuffed-vegetable format was fashionable in American home cookery of the period, a genteel way of turning a plain boiled root into something that could be sent to table on its own plate with a garnish. Watercress was often used as a trimming in this period, cheap, peppery and reliably available, and it does more work here than decoration: its bite offsets the sweetness of the beet. Beets themselves had long been kitchen-garden and root-cellar staples, and recipes like this one show the effort cookbook writers put into making winter storage vegetables look like something other than winter storage vegetables.