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Sweet Pickled Beets
Boil them in a porcelain kettle till they can be pierced with a silver fork; when cool cut lengthwise to size of a medium cucumber; boil equal parts vinegar and sugar with half a table-spoon. ground cloves tied in a cloth to each gallon; pour boiling hot over the beets. -Mrs. Samuel Woods, Milford Center, Ohio.
A contributor's quick sweet pickle from a book that assumes you know beets need long boiling and that a stone crock lives in the cellar. The only real technique here is keeping metal away from the beets and the syrup.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or enamelled steel pot, not porcelain. Beet juice and vinegar both attack bare iron, aluminium and unlined copper, which dulls the colour and picks up a metallic taste; use enamel or stainless steel throughout.
- The silver forkSilver is non-reactive, which is likely why it was named, but any thin skewer works. Whole unpeeled beets take 30 to 60 minutes at a simmer depending on size; leave an inch of stem and the root tail on so they do not bleed out.
- PeelingNot mentioned because it was obvious: the skins slip off under cold running water once the beets have cooled. Cut them after peeling, into pieces roughly the length and thickness of a medium cucumber, or into quarters and thick slices for smaller beets.
- Equal parts vinegar and sugarRead as volume for volume, which gives a frankly sweet syrup. Use cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity; nineteenth-century household vinegar varied, so do not substitute anything weaker.
- Half a tablespoon of cloves to the gallonA gallon of syrup is far more than a home batch needs. For about 3 lb of cooked beets, figure 2 cups vinegar and 2 cups sugar with a scant half teaspoon of ground cloves; whole cloves tied in cheesecloth or a tea ball give a cleaner result than ground, which muddies the syrup.
- Pour boiling hotThe heat of the syrup is all the processing the recipe gives, so pack the beets into clean jars, cover them completely with the boiling liquid, and cool before capping.
- StorageThis is a refrigerator pickle, not a shelf-stable preserve. Keep it cold and eat within a month or so; for anything intended for the cupboard, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure.
- Yield and servingAbout three pints from 3 lb of beets. The flavour is much better after two or three days, served cold alongside cold meat or a heavy roast.
Buckeye Cookery (Minneapolis, 1877, and much reprinted) was assembled from contributions by named housewives, and this entry carries Mrs. Samuel Woods of Milford Center in central Ohio. Sugar and vinegar together were a standard way to hold a cellar crop past its season: beets keep well raw, but boiled and steeped in sweetened vinegar they became a relish that could sit on the table beside salt pork or roast beef all winter. The insistence on a porcelain kettle and a silver fork reflects a real kitchen problem of the period, when most pots were iron, tinned or copper and any of them would spoil an acid pickle. Cloves were a common spice for sweet pickling in American cookbooks of the 1870s, often tied in a cloth so the ground spice would not cloud the syrup.