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Sugared Beets
4 hot boiled beets 3 tablespoons butter 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt Cut beets in one-fourth inch slices, add butter, sugar, and salt; reheat for serving.
A four-ingredient side that depends almost entirely on how the beets are cooked before they reach the pan.
- Boiling the beetsLeave an inch of stem and the whole root tail on, and do not peel before boiling, or the color and sugar bleed into the water. Medium beets take 35-50 minutes; the skins slip off under cold running water.
- QuantityFour beets is vague by modern standards. Assume medium roots, somewhere between 1 1/4 and 1 3/4 lb trimmed, serving four.
- Butter and sugar in proportionThree tablespoons of butter to a pound and a quarter of beets is richer than most cooks would use today; two will do, and the sugar can be cut to a teaspoon if the beets are freshly dug and already sweet.
- ReheatingUse a wide pan over moderate heat and toss until the butter and sugar melt into a light glaze, two or three minutes. Longer and the slices soften into mush and the sugar starts to caramelize on the pan bottom.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe specifies one-fourth inch. Thinner rounds are more likely to break up in the tossing, and much thicker ones may not warm through in so brief a reheat.
- FinishingA spoonful of cider vinegar or lemon juice off the heat balances the sugar, though the original gives none.
Beets kept well and were commonly stored in sand or a root cellar through the winter and boiled as needed. Buttering and sugaring is one of several period treatments for such a root, though how widespread it was is not documented. The dish is a plainer relative of the better-known Harvard beets, which add vinegar and a cornstarch-thickened sauce; the short, closely measured form of the recipe is characteristic of the turn-of-the-century domestic-science cookbooks, whose exact quantities were part of their instructional method. That the recipe begins from beets already boiled suggests they were expected to be cooked as a preliminary step rather than to order, though the text says nothing about batch cooking.