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Beetroot Custard
Boil two beetroots and cut them into thin slices. Slice two large onions, and fry them white in two ounces of butter. Stir a table-spoonful of flour into a half pint of milk, and add two table-spoonfuls of sugar, with salt, pepper, and two table-spoonfuls of vinegar. Boil for five minutes, stirring all the time. Add the slices of beetroot, and stew for half an hour. Serve with a border of mashed potatoes ornamented with pieces of parsley. Probable cost, 1s.
A sweet-sour beetroot stew thickened with milk, despite the name it is not a custard in any modern sense — there are no eggs and no baking. The one thing to watch is the vinegar going into the milk.
- The vinegar will curdle the milkTwo tablespoons of vinegar in half a pint of milk splits it almost immediately. Add the vinegar at the very end, off the heat, or accept a slightly grainy sauce; a light roux made with the butter first gives the flour enough of a hold to keep the sauce cohesive.
- Fry them whiteThis means sweating the onions in butter over low heat until soft and translucent with no colour at all. Any browning changes the flavour and muddies the pink the beetroot gives the sauce.
- MeasuresA half pint here is the Imperial half pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups. Two ounces of butter is roughly 4 tablespoons.
- BeetrootThe recipe gives no size; around 1 lb / 450 g in total is a reasonable reading. Boil whole and unpeeled with the root tail intact, 40–60 minutes depending on size, then peel and slice — cutting them first leaches colour into the water.
- The half-hour stewAlready-boiled beetroot needs nothing like thirty minutes. Ten is enough to marry the flavours; longer and the slices break down and the sauce reduces to a sticky glaze. Keep the pan barely at a simmer.
- Seasoning balanceTwo tablespoons of sugar against two of vinegar makes this frankly sweet-sour, closer to a hot pickled beet. Taste before serving and adjust — beetroot varieties differ enormously in their own sugar content.
- Yield and servingProbably enough for about four as a side dish. The mashed potato border is spooned or piped around the edge of a hot dish with the beetroot in the centre; a simple ring of mash with the stew ladled into the well does the same job.
- Probable costOne shilling, that is twelve pence, at a time when a labourer's weekly wage might be around twenty shillings.
The sweet-sour treatment of beetroot with onion, sugar and vinegar is much older than the book, and it has parallels in the Northern European tradition of such preparations and the Scandinavian pickled beet. Beetroot was long grown mainly for salads and pickling, and books of this period keep proposing ways to serve it hot. The mashed-potato border with parsley is pure late-Victorian dining-room presentation: a plain vegetable dish given a moulded edge so it could be sent to table looking composed.