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Beetroot, Stewed
Wash and boil, till tender, a medium-sized beetroot. Remove the skin, and cut it into thin slices. Roll half an ounce of butter in flour, and melt it in rather more than half a pint of water, adding a table-spoonful of vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste. Put the slices of beet into the liquid, cover the saucepan closely, and allow all to stew for an hour and ten minutes. Care must be taken not to cut the beetroot before boiling, as the colour will be destroyed by so doing. Serve the stew with a garnish of boiled button onions.
A straightforward Victorian vegetable dish: beets boiled whole, then finished in a thin floured-butter sauce sharpened with vinegar. Two things in the method need adjusting for a modern stove.
- Boil it whole and untrimmedThis is the hinge of the recipe, and the book is right about it. Leave the skin on, the tail intact and an inch of stalk at the crown; any cut surface bleeds pigment and the beet goes pale and the water purple. Scrub rather than peel, and rub the skin off under cold water once cooked.
- Boiling timeA medium beet (about 3 in. across) takes 40-60 minutes at a simmer, longer for older winter roots. Test with a skewer at the thickest point rather than by the clock.
- "Rather more than half a pint"An Imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, so read this as about 1 1/4 US cups of water. With only half an ounce of butter and its flour, the result is a very thin liquor by modern standards.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: work the half ounce of soft butter with roughly two teaspoons of flour into a paste, then whisk it into the warm liquid so it thickens without lumping.
- The stewing timeAn hour and ten minutes on an already-tender boiled beet will collapse the slices and bleach them into the sauce. Fifteen to twenty minutes covered is enough to marry the flavours; if the sauce is watery, lift the beets out and reduce it before returning them.
- VinegarA tablespoon of plain malt or cider vinegar suits it. Beyond seasoning, the acid helps hold the red colour, though the recipe itself gives no reason for adding it at the start.
- The onion garnishCook the button onions separately in salted water or stock, 10-15 minutes for peeled pearl onions, and add them at serving. Stewed in the beet liquor they simply turn pink.
- YieldOne medium beetroot gives a side dish for two or three. Doubling works, but keep the sauce roughly proportional or it will drown the slices.
Boiled beetroot was familiar in British kitchens chiefly as a cold pickle or salad, and this recipe treats it instead as a hot vegetable served in a sauce. It demonstrates two lessons rather than one: the use of a floured butter to bind a sauce, and the rule that a root's skin is its own container boboil potatoes in their jackets. Beet's pigments, the betalains, are water-soluble and unstable, which is why nineteenth-century cookery writing commonly repeats the warning against cutting or piercing the root before cooking, and why the acid in the sauce does real work here. Setting a pale vegetable against a strongly coloured one is a familiar Victorian garnishing habit.