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Boiled Beets
Wash carefully but do not cut or scrape them. If the skin is broken before cooking they lose their flavor and color in the boiling water. Throw them into boiling water and boil one hour. When done, drain and quickly rub off the skins. Cut them in slices, dust with salt and pepper, pour over them a tablespoonful of melted butter and serve. Cold ones left over may be used in salad.
A plain treatment of beets that depends almost entirely on one thing: keeping the skins intact until after cooking. A few notes on timing and handling.
- The hinge: unbroken skinTrim the leaves to about an inch above the crown and leave the taproot on. Any cut into the flesh lets the pigment (betanin) and sugars leach into the water, and the beets come out pale and flat-tasting.
- One hour is for small beetsThe hour assumes young summer beets of 1½ to 2 inches. Full-grown storage beets of 3 inches or more take 1½ to 2 hours. Test with a thin skewer through the thickest part; it should meet no resistance.
- Skinning while hot"Quickly rub off the skins" works only while the beets are still hot, so drain and slip them under cold running water just long enough to handle. A paper towel gives better grip than bare fingers, and beet juice stains hands and wooden boards.
- Acidulate the water if you likeA tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice in the boiling water helps hold the red color. The original does not call for it and it is not required, but it makes a visible difference with older beets.
- Quantity and yieldNo amount is given. Reckon about 1½ lb of untrimmed beets, or roughly six small ones, for four people as a side dish, with a tablespoon of butter as written.
- SaltingSalt the beets after peeling, as directed, rather than the cooking water; whole skins limit how much salt gets in during boiling, so seasoning the bath is of little benefit here.
- The leftoversThe suggestion to use cold beets in salad is sound. Dress them separately from any greens or they will dye the whole bowl.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a distinctly American genre of the late nineteenth century: the summer cookery pamphlet, written for houses where the coal range turned the kitchen into an oven. Boiled beets fit that program well atattended, and good served cool or in a salad the next day. Garden beets (Beta vulgaris, the same species as chard and the sugar beet) were a staple of the American kitchen garden and cellar, and the instruction to leave the skin whole is one of those pieces of practical knowledge that appears in cookbook after cookbook of the period, well before anyone described the chemistry of the pigment that made it true.