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Boiled Beets
Wash carefully, but do not cut or scrape. If the skin is broken before cooking, the juice will go out into the water and the beets lose both flavor and color while cooking. Young beets will cook nicely in one hour, old ones-Mrs. Henderson says-require forever; but four hours' cooking will, as a rule, make them tender. If, however, they are tough and wilted, as is frequently the case in mid-winter, they should be soaked over night in cold water; if still wilted, they will never become palatable or tender. Beets should be put on to cook in boiling water and should be taken from the water at the end of the time given, thrown into cold water just a moment and the skin should be rubbed off with a towel. Then cut into slices, dish, dust with salt and pepper, pour a small quantity of melted butter over them and they are ready to serve.
Beets that are left over should be put at once into cold vinegar and used as pickles or as a garnish for potato salad.
The method is sound and still the best way to boil beets; only the timings belong to another era of produce.
- Leave the skin intactThis is the hinge of the recipe. Trim the stems to an inch or so and leave the root tail on; any cut through the skin bleeds colour and sugar into the water and leaves you with pale, flat-tasting beets.
- Real timingsSmall beets of 2 inches or less are tender in 25 to 40 minutes; medium ones take 45 minutes to an hour. The four hours described here assumes a storage beet that has been in a cellar since autumn. Test with a thin skewer at the thickest point rather than by the clock.
- "Mrs. Henderson"Mary Foote Henderson, author of Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving (1876), a book frequently quoted in later American kitchen manuals. The remark about old beets requiring "forever" is her joke, not a measurement.
- The overnight soakStill worth doing for beets that have gone soft and rubbery in storage; it rehydrates them somewhat. The author is right that badly wilted beets are past saving, and a supermarket beet rarely needs this at all.
- SkinningThe cold-water dip and towel rub works, but the skins slip most easily while the beets are still warm rather than fully chilled. Wear gloves or use a dark cloth, since the stain is hard to get out of fabric.
- Butter and seasoningAbout 1 to 2 tablespoons of melted butter per pound of beets, with salt and pepper. A splash of cider vinegar or lemon juice added with the butter brightens them considerably and is in keeping with the vinegar note at the end.
- YieldA pound of trimmed beets, roughly three medium ones, serves three or four as a side dish.
- The leftoversSliced beets covered with cold vinegar and refrigerated keep about a week. These are quick refrigerator pickles, not a preserved shelf-stable product, so they should stay cold.
Beets were grown in Europe for their leaves long before their roots became a staple; the swollen red root familiar today is generally traced to Germany and Italy from the sixteenth century onward, and by the nineteenth it was a fixture of the American root cellar because it stored for months without processing. That storage habit explains almost everything odd about this recipe: the four-hour boil, the overnight soak, and the resigned observation that mid-winter beets are frequently tough and wilted. The recipe seems to reckon with the beet in both its states, freshly pulled and small, and woody late in the season, and needed instructions for both. The closing direction to drop leftovers straight into cold vinegar reflects the same economy, turning a cooked vegetable into a pickle before it had a chance to spoil.