Home › Salads and Dressings › Beet Salad
Beet Salad
Slice and cut into dice sufficient cold beets to make one pint. When ready to serve heap in the centre of the salad dish, and cover with a half pint of sauce tartar. Garnish with curly parsley and serve.
A two-ingredient composed salad that depends entirely on the quality of the beets and the sauce. Everything hinges on the beets being fully cooked and thoroughly chilled before they are diced.
- QuantitiesA pint of diced beets is 2 cups, roughly three medium beets once cooked and peeled. A half pint of sauce tartare is 1 cup, which is generous; start with two-thirds of that and add more if the beets are not coated.
- "Cold beets"The recipe calls only for beets already cooked and cold, whether left from another meal or cooked ahead for this one. Boil or roast whole unpeeled beets until a skewer slides through, 40-60 minutes depending on size, then cool completely and slip off the skins before dicing. Warm beets will thin the sauce and bleed into it.
- Sauce tartare in this periodNot the thin jarred fish sauce of today. In turn-of-the-century American cookery it means a stiff mayonnaise sharpened with vinegar or mustard and stirred through with chopped capers, gherkins or pickled cucumber, onion, and parsley or tarragon.
- Raw eggMayonnaise made from scratch contains uncooked yolk and is not heated at any point here. Use pasteurized eggs, or a good commercial mayonnaise as the base, if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised.
- Dress at the last momentThe instruction "when ready to serve" is doing real work. Beet juice turns a pale sauce a uniform pink within minutes, and the dish is meant to be a white mound over red dice.
- Cutting the diceSlice the beets no more than a quarter inch thick and cut them square. Even dice hold their shape in a heap; irregular chunks slump and look like the sauce failed.
- YieldTwo cups of beets under a cup of sauce serves four to six as a side salad, on lettuce leaves or alone on a flat dish.
Beets are often said to have come into American salad bowls by way of the cellar: they store for months in sand or sawdust, so a cook in February had beets when she had little else green or fresh. That is why they turn up dressed with rich sauces rather than eaten as a delicate spring vegetable. The pairing with sauce tartare reflects the late nineteenth-century habit of treating mayonnaise-based sauces as all-purpose salad dressings, interchangeable across fish, chicken, potato and root vegetables. Books of this era, aimed at cooks working with what the pantry held, often present such dishes as assembly instructions rather than recipes proper, assuming the sauce and the cooked beets already exist somewhere in the kitchen.