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Beetroot, Boiled
This root is excellent as a salad, and as a garnish for other salads it is very important on account of its beautiful bright colour. In cleansing it before boiling, take care not to break the skin, or it will lose its colour and become sickly looking. Remove it from the saucepan carefully, peel and trim nicely. Serve, cut in slices, with melted butter in a tureen, or if not over large it may be sent to table whole. A large one will take from two to three hours to boil. Probable cost, from 1d. to 2d. each.
A method note rather than a formula: the whole point is keeping the beet intact so the colour stays in the root instead of bleeding into the water.
- The hinge: an unbroken skinWash with a cloth or soft brush rather than a peeler or knife, leave an inch or two of stalk and the whole taproot attached, and twist off the leaves rather than cutting them close. Any cut releases the betanin pigment and you get pale beets and crimson water.
- Two to three hours is for old rootsThat timing assumes large, mature, late-season beetroot of a kind rarely sold now. Small to medium beets of 2-3 in. take 30-45 minutes at a bare simmer; a genuinely large winter beet may want 1 1/2 hours. Test with a skewer through the thickest part, not with a fork that pierces the skin repeatedly.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn British books of this period melted butter means a thin white sauce built on butter and flour with water or milk, not simply butter liquefied in a pan. Served in a tureen it was meant to be poured over the sliced root at table.
- PeelingSkins slip off under cold running water once the beet is cooked and just cool enough to handle. Do it before the root chills completely, and expect stained hands unless you use gloves.
- Acid in the waterA tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice in the pot is often recommended to help fix the colour, a refinement this entry leaves out. Salt the water lightly.
- Quantity and servingReckon one medium beet per two people as a side dish, or one large beet for a salad serving four to six. Sliced beetroot dressed while still warm with oil and vinegar absorbs far more seasoning than cold slices do.
- The costing1d. to 2d. each is pre-decimal British currency and is useful only as evidence that beetroot was among the cheapest things on the greengrocer's stall.
Beetroot earns its place in a Victorian dictionary of cookery less for flavour than for colour: in an era when a dressed salad or a cold buffet dish was judged on its appearance, sliced or stamped-out beetroot supplied a bright red that no other cheap vegetable could. The garden beet was bred up from the same wild sea beet as chard, and its sweet swollen root is generally traced to the early modern period; by the mid-nineteenth century it was a staple of the English kitchen garden and a market vegetable sold by the piece. The insistence on long, gentle boiling in the skin reflects the roots actually available then, often stored through winter and correspondingly tough. Roasting in the skin, now the more common treatment, appears in period cookery too.