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Beetroot, Buttered
Boil the beetroot in the ordinary way, then peel and cut it into thick round slices, sprinkle a little pepper and salt, some warmed butter, and a little minced parsley over. Serve as hot as possible. Probable cost, 1d. to 2d. each.
A one-line vegetable dish that depends almost entirely on the boiling, which the original assumes you already know how to do. The points below fill in what Cassell's took for granted.
- "Boil in the ordinary way"Whole, unpeeled, with the tap root and about an inch of stalk left on. Cut beet bleeds its colour into the water and turns pale and watery; medium roots take 40-60 minutes at a bare simmer, large ones well over an hour. They are done when the skin slips under thumb pressure.
- PeelingDo it while the beets are hot, under cold running water or in a bowl of cold water. The skins rub off with a cloth or gloved hands; the pigment stains fingers, wooden boards and pale worktops.
- Warmed butter, not meltedThe original specifies 'warmed', which suggests butter soft enough to coat the slices rather than taken to the point of separating, when it tends to run off and pool. A modern working quantity is roughly 1 oz (30 g) per pound of beet.
- Serving as hot as possibleBeetroot loses heat quickly once sliced. Warm the dish, slice at the last moment, and dress at the table if you can. Cold buttered beet is edible but the dish is nothing without heat.
- SeasoningBeet will take a fair amount of salt. The original leaves out any acid; a splash of vinegar or lemon in the butter is a modern addition that sharpens the sweetness, though Victorian recipes generally reserve vinegar for pickled beetroot.
- YieldThe costing is per root, and a medium beet of 6-8 oz serves one to two as a side. Four medium beets will do six people alongside a roast.
- The cost note"1d. to 2d. each" is one to two old pence, pre-decimal currency in which twelve pence made a shilling. It is a marker of how cheap the root was, not a figure with any modern equivalent.
Beetroot was grown in British gardens from the seventeenth century onwards and was well established as a kitchen root by the Victorian period, when much of it was pickled -- boiled, sliced, and steeped in spiced vinegar for the cold table and the salad bowl -- though hot buttered beetroot also appears in period cookery books. The 'Probable cost' line, attached to most entries in the Dictionary, reflects the book's audience: middle-class households running on a fixed weekly allowance. Boiling the root whole and unbroken to keep its colour is long-standing practice, and remains the single thing that separates a good dish of beetroot from a grey one.