Home › Vegetables › Beets with Cream Sauce
Beets with Cream Sauce
Select sweet, white beets, and boil as directed in the preceding recipe. When the beets are done, rub off the skin and cut them into dice. Put them in a heated vegetable dish and pour over Cream Sauce.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already know how to boil a beet and how to make a cream sauce. Both assumptions need filling in.
- White beetsNineteenth-century kitchen gardens grew white- and yellow-rooted beets alongside red ones, valued because they do not bleed into a pale sauce. Golden or Chioggia beets are the closest thing at a market now; red beets work but will turn the cream pink.
- The preceding recipeThe preceding recipe is not reproduced here, but the usual period method is beets whole and unpeeled, with an inch of stem and the whole taproot left on so they do not bleed, covered in salted water and simmered until tender. Small young beets may take 30 to 40 minutes; large old ones can want an hour and a half or considerably longer. Test with a skewer, not a clock.
- Rubbing off the skinThis works only while the beets are hot. Drain, run cold water over them for a few seconds so you can handle them, then push the skin off with your thumbs or a paper towel. Left to cool completely, the skin clings and you are back to a peeler.
- Cream sauceIn books of this period this is normally a plain white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour, then 1 cup of milk or thin cream whisked in and simmered a few minutes until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and a little pepper. Check the book's own Cream Sauce entry if it differs. Make it while the beets boil, and keep it thin enough to pour.
- Heated dishNot decoration. Diced beets and a flour-thickened sauce both cool fast, and the sauce sets to a skin in a cold bowl. Warm the serving dish in the oven or with hot water.
- SeasoningBeets and cream sauce together are flat without acid. A spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice stirred into the sauce, or a little grated horseradish, is period-appropriate and does the dish a favour.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; roughly 1.5 lb of beets with a cup of sauce would serve four as a side dish.
Cream sauce over boiled vegetables was a common polite treatment in American and English cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward: the same b\, celery, salsify, carrots and peas. The call for white beets reflects a garden reality that has largely vanished from commerce. Seed catalogues of the period listed white and yellow beet varieties as well as the deep red ones, and cooks preferred the pale sorts precisely for dishes like this, where red juice would stain the sauce. Sugar beet breeding pulled the white types toward the industrial field crop, and the red beetroot became the one you buy, so a modern cook following this recipe literally has to hunt for what was once ordinary.