Beet Salad
Slice, and cut into dice, sufficient cold, boiled beets to make one pint; heap them in the centre of a salad dish and cover with a half pint of sauce Tartare. Garnish with parsley, and serve very cold.
Two ingredients and an assembly, so nearly everything rests on the beets being properly cooked and properly cold.
- Measure by volumeOne pint of diced beets is 2 cups, roughly 3 medium beets or a 1 lb bunch once trimmed. The half pint of sauce is 1 cup, which is generous — the beets should be coated, not drowned.
- Boiling the beetsLeave an inch of stem and the root tail on and do not peel before cooking, or the color bleeds into the water. Whole medium beets take 35-50 minutes at a simmer; the skins slip off under cold running water.
- Cold means coldThis is a hot-weather book and the instruction to serve very cold is the point of the dish. Chill the diced beets thoroughly before saucing, or the mayonnaise slackens and runs pink.
- Sauce Tartare in this periodA mayonnaise base with chopped capers, gherkins or cucumber pickle, parsley and often a little onion or tarragon. Nineteenth-century versions are sharper and looser than the thick jarred product sold now.
- Raw egg in the mayonnaiseIf you make the sauce from scratch, use pasteurized eggs when serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg as a matter of course.
- Assembly and stainingFold the sauce in at the last moment, or spoon it over the heaped beets as written and let diners mix. Once mixed, beet juice will tint the sauce pink and eventually the whole dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pint of beets with a cup of sauce will serve about four as a side salad. Some salads of this era were set on a base of lettuce leaves, though this one does not call for it.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a genre of small American cookbooks published for the summer months, when coal ranges made the kitchen unbearable and cooks wanted dishes that could be boiled early, chilled, and served without further heat — beets cooked at dawn and dressed at noon fit that logic exactly. Cold vegetables masked with a mayonnaise-based sauce were one common form of salad in the late nineteenth century, alongside oil-and-vinegar dressings, which were also in wide use at the time. Sauce tartare itself is generally traced to French kitchen practice of the mid-1800s, where it was a mayonnaise sharpened with capers and pickles and served with fried fish; American cookbooks of the period applied it more broadly, to cold meats, cold vegetables and eggs alike. Beets suited summer cookery because they keep well, taste sweet cold, and supply strong color, here set off against white sauce and green parsley.