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Beet Salad
Boil 6 beets and chop finely 1 head of celery, add pepper and salt.
A one-line recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already knows what a salad is. The gaps are worth naming before you start.
- No dressing is givenAs written this is seasoned beets and celery with nothing to bind them. Beet salads of this period were commonly dressed with oil and vinegar, or with a little of the beet cooking liquid sharpened with vinegar; something in the region of three parts oil to one of vinegar suits it. Dress while the beets are still warm so they take up the acid.
- "1 head of celery"A head means the whole bunch, not a single rib. Celery of the period was generally stringier than modern Pascal types, so peel the outer strings; one modern bunch is a reasonable quantity for six beets.
- Boiling the beetsLeave an inch of stem and the root tail on and do not peel before cooking, or the colour bleeds into the water. Medium beets take 35 to 50 minutes at a simmer; they are done when a skewer slides in without resistance. The skins slip off under cold running water.
- Beet size"6 beets" is genuinely open-ended. Assume medium roots of about 2 to 2 1/2 inches, roughly 1 1/2 lb trimmed, which balances one bunch of celery.
- Chop the beets tooThe sentence only assigns chopping to the celery, but the beets need dicing or slicing thin as well. Cut them after cooking and cooling slightly.
- SeasoningBeets are sweet and want more salt than most vegetables. Salt after dressing, taste, and salt again.
- YieldServes six as a side salad. It keeps two or three days covered in the refrigerator and improves on the second day, though the celery softens.
Boiled beets dressed with vinegar were standard cold-table fare in North American and British kitchens through the nineteenth century, and this terse entry reflects how routine the dish was: the compiler saw no need to spell out the dressing because every cook had one. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional volume for its flour, gathered largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which accounts for the telegraphic style of contributions like this one. Beets and celery were both good keepers, cellared through the winter, and pairing a sweet root with a crisp, saline-tasting stalk gave a fresh-seeming salad in months when fresh salad greens were scarce.