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Beets (Remove leaves wash clean being)
Remove leaves, wash clean, being careful not to break off the little fibers and rootlets, as the juices would thereby escape and they would lose their color; boil in plenty of water, if young, two hours, if old, four or five hours, trying with a fork to see when tender, take out, drop in a pan of cold water, and slip off the skin with the hands; slice those needed for immediate use, place in a dish, add salt, pepper, butter, and if not very sweet a tea-spoon sugar, set over boiling water to heat thoroughly, and serve hot with or without vinegar; put those which remain into a stone jar whole, cover with vinegar, keep in a cool place, take out as wanted, slice and serve.
A few pieces of horse-radish put into the jar will prevent a white scum on the vinegar. Or, roast in hot ashes, or bake in oven, (turning often in the pan with a knife, as a fork causes the juice to flow), and when tender, peel, slice, and dress with salt, pepper, butter and vinegar. Or, after beets are boiled and skinned, mash together with boiled potatoes, and season to the taste with. salt; add a large lump of butter (do not use any milk); place in a dish, make a hole in center in which put in a generous lump of butter; sprinkle with pepper and serve at once. This is a New England dish, and very delicious for harvest time, when beets are young and sweet..
A straightforward beet recipe whose only real problem is the timing, which reflects nineteenth-century storage beets rather than anything you will buy today.
- Boiling timesTwo hours for young beets and four or five for old is far beyond modern practice. Small young beets are tender in 25-40 minutes, larger storage beets in 50-70; test with a skewer rather than working to the clock.
- Why the tails stay onThe instruction to leave root and rootlets intact and not to pierce with a fork is sound. Cut surfaces bleed pigment into the water, leaving pale beets and red cooking liquid. Trim the greens to an inch above the crown and leave the taproot whole.
- RoastingFor the oven version, 400F, wrapped or covered, is the usual approach; whole medium beets take 45-60 minutes. The direction to turn them with a knife rather than a fork is again about not puncturing the skin.
- The vinegar jarWhole cooked beets covered with vinegar in a crock are refrigerator pickles, not preserves. Keep them in the fridge in a covered glass or ceramic container and use within two or three weeks. Nothing here is processed for shelf storage, so do not treat it as canning. The horseradish is a folk measure against surface yeast and does no harm.
- "Set over boiling water"A double boiler or a bowl over a pan of simmering water. It is there to warm the dressed slices through without frying them in the butter.
- The New England mashEqual weights of beet and potato is a reasonable starting point. The reason for the ban on milk is not given, but added liquid makes the mixture slack and dilutes the red, where butter alone keeps it firm. Mash while both vegetables are hot.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, two pounds of beets will dress four as a side dish, and the mash with an equal weight of potatoes will stretch to about six.
- Stone jarA glazed earthenware crock. Any nonreactive vessel does the same job; avoid aluminium or bare cast iron with the vinegar.
Beets were a staple of the American root cellar, which explains the four- and five-hour boil: by late winter a beet held over from autumn is woody, and long cooking was the usual remedy. The recipe's structure, one basic method followed by "Or," and "Or," is characteristic of Buckeye Cookery (published in Minneapolis in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, itself a revision of the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book), which gathered contributed household practice rather than composing a single authoritative version of a dish. The final variation, beets mashed with potato and butter and no milk, resembles the beet-and-potato base of the New England dish known as red flannel hash, though that is normally fried and normally includes corned beef; here it appears plain, and the note that it suits harvest time is a reminder that this book's readers ate beets twice over, sweet and fresh in September and pickled in vinegar for the months after.