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Beet Salad Farci
Boil and peel 6 good-sized beets; cut off the ends and scoop out the centre, leaving a wall about 1/3 of an inch thick. Soak in vinegar for two hours, then drain and fill with the following mixture: 1 cucumber, 1 tomato, 1 bunch of celery, 1/2 cupful of finely chopped beets, salt, and a dash of cayenne. Pour over a French dressing, and serve at once.
A straightforward stuffed-vegetable salad that depends on two things the original leaves unsaid: beets cooked until genuinely tender, and everything served cold and dry rather than weeping into the plate.
- FarciFrench for "stuffed" — the beets are hollowed out and used as edible cups. Nothing is baked; the whole dish is cold.
- Boiling the beetsLeave the skins on and an inch of stem while boiling so they don't bleed out; 40-60 minutes for medium beets, until a skewer slides through. The skins slip off under cold running water. Roasting at 400F wrapped in foil works as well and gives a firmer wall to carve.
- Hollowing outA melon baller or a grapefruit spoon does this far better than a knife. A third-inch wall is thin — go slightly thicker if the beets are soft, or they will slump when filled.
- The vinegar soakTwo hours in plain vinegar is aggressive by current taste. A 50/50 vinegar-and-water bath, or a light pickling liquid with a pinch of sugar, seasons the shells without making them sharp. Drain them upside down before filling.
- "1 bunch of celery"Ambiguous in period usage: it can mean a whole head or a few stalks. For six beet cups, two or three finely diced stalks is the sensible reading — a full head would swamp the other vegetables.
- Seed the wet vegetablesHalve and seed the cucumber and tomato and dice them small. Salting the dice for ten minutes and draining keeps the filling from flooding the shells.
- French dressingIn this period that means a simple oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper — not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name today.
- Serve at onceMeant literally: dress at the table or moments before. The filling picks up beet colour and the shells soften fairly quickly. Six beets serve six as a first course, on lettuce or watercress.