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Some Kitchen Kinks: Beets
Beets.--Beets are among our most useful vegetables, since they may be had all through the summer and may also be stored in good condition for winter use. Sometimes beets are cut in small pieces, after boiling, and served with white sauce, but the most common as well as the most palatable way of serving them is with but- about the size of a white turnip, and ter.
Beets with Butter.
Wash the beets, being careful not to break the skin. Put into a stewpan and cover generously with boiling water and boil until tender. Young beets will cook in one hour.
As the beets grow old the time of cooking must be increased. In winter this vegetable becomes so hard it may require four or more hours of steady boiling to soften it. It is then only suitable for pickling in vinegar after being thoroughly boiled.
When the young beets are cooked, take them from the boiling water and drop them into cold water. Rub off the skin. Cut the beets in thin slices and season with salt and butter.
Serve at once.
A plain method that still works, with one detail worth respecting: the skins stay on until the beets are cooked, or the colour and sweetness bleed into the water.
- Do not pierce the skinTrim the stalks to about an inch and leave the root tail intact rather than cutting flush. A cut beet leaches red juice and flavour into the pot and comes out pale and watery.
- Cooking timesThe recipe allows an hour for young beets and says older ones need longer. Small young beets of 2 in. or less are often tender in 25-35 minutes today. Test with a skewer through the thickest part rather than by the clock.
- Winter beetsThe four-hour boil described here belongs to root-cellar beets that had dried and toughened over months. Refrigerated supermarket beets rarely reach that state, so treat the long time as a curiosity rather than an instruction.
- The cold-water dipDropping the hot beets into cold water is what makes the skins slip off under the thumb. Do it while they are still hot; cooled beets fight back.
- StewpanAny deep saucepan with a lid. "Cover generously with boiling water" means an inch or two above the beets, since they will be in there a while and want topping up.
- SeasoningSalt and butter alone is the treatment given here, added after cooking. A splash of vinegar or lemon at the table sharpens the sweetness without dulling the colour.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantity; about 2 lb of beets, roughly 5-6 medium roots, would serve four as a side dish.
- Oven alternativeThe same beets wrapped and roasted at 400F for 45-60 minutes concentrate rather than dilute their sugars. The skins slip just as readily.
Beets earned their place in a household book of this kind less for flavour than for keeping quality: packed in sand or sawdust in a cool cellar, the roots held from autumn harvest into spring, which is why the entry troubles to describe boiling times for a vegetable that has gone hard with age. The garden beet is a cultivated form of sea beet, bred in Europe for its swollen root, and by the nineteenth century it was standard in American kitchen gardens. The suggestion that thoroughly boiled winter beets are fit only for pickling reflects ordinary domestic economy rather than any defect in the root -- vinegar was the usual way to make a tired vegetable palatable again, and pickled beets remained a fixture of the cold table for generations.