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To Boil Beets
Wash them. Do not break or cut the roots. Leave an inch of the tops, so that the color and juice cannot escape. Boil hard for two hours. When tender, slice them, sprinkling over them sugar, then butter and salt to the taste. Sugar is the greatest improvement.--Mrs. S. T.
A plain boiled beet, dressed hot with sugar, butter and salt. The technique holds up; only the timing needs a second look.
- The hinge: keep the beet sealedLeaving an inch of stem and the whole taproot intact is the entire point of the method. Any cut through the skin bleeds colour and sugar into the water and leaves the beet pale and flat-tasting.
- Two hours is for large winter beetsStorage beets the size of a fist may genuinely want 90 minutes to two hours. Bunched beets of 2-3 inches are tender in 30 to 45 minutes; test with a skewer through the thickest part rather than watching the clock.
- PeelingThe recipe does not mention it, presumably as understood: once boiled and briefly cooled, the skins slip off under the thumb. Do this before slicing, and wear gloves or accept stained hands.
- "Boil hard"A hard rolling boil for two hours will need topping up with boiling water to keep the beets covered. A steady simmer gives the same result with less attention.
- The sugarMrs. S. T. is not wrong that it improves them; how nineteenth-century table beets compared in sweetness to modern varieties is not something we can pin down. Start with a teaspoon or so for a pound of sliced beets and taste before adding more.
- QuantityReckon on about 1 lb of untrimmed beets for three people as a side dish; they cook down less than greens but slice smaller than they look.
- Serving temperatureThe butter needs the beets hot to melt into them. Slice and dress straight from the pot, or the dish sets into something closer to a cold salad.
Beets were a workhorse of the Southern kitchen garden: they stored well in sand through the winter, the tops were eaten as greens in spring, and the roots turned up boiled, buttered or pickled in vinegar. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered contributions from named and initialled Virginia housewives, and the terse, assumed-knowledge style here is typical of the book -- Mrs. S. T. does not mention peeling at all. The insistence on leaving the root and a stub of top intact is genuinely old kitchen wisdom, long repeated in English and American cookbooks, and it survives in modern instructions for the same reason it appeared here: the pigment that makes a beet red is water-soluble and leaves through any wound.