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Beets Supreme
1 doz. small beets. 1/2 C sugar. 1/2 T cornstarch. Edna F. Doerschuk. 1/2 C vinegar 2 thin slices onions 1 T butter Boil beets tender; remove skins and cut into cubes or fancy shapes. Make a sauce with sugar, cornstarch and vinegar, stirring constantly. Let boil 5 minutes. Slice into this sauce one or two thin slices of onion, and pour over beets. Let stand for half an hour or longer. When ready to serve, slowly heat, add a generous T of butter and serve piping hot. Especially nice to serve with a chicken or lamb dinner. Mrs. Smock.
This is a Harvard-beet sauce under a fancier name, and the printed ingredient list is incomplete — sugar and cornstarch appear in the method but never get quantities. A few notes before you start.
- The missing amountsOnly vinegar, onion and butter are given measures. Many sweet-sour beet recipes use roughly 1/2 cup sugar and 1 tablespoon cornstarch to a half cup of vinegar, sometimes with a little water or beet cooking liquid added. Treat that as a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- Slake the cornstarchStir the cornstarch into the sugar dry, or into cold liquid, before it meets hot vinegar. Dropped straight into a warm pan it seizes into lumps that will not whisk out.
- Five minutes is long for cornstarchCornstarch reaches full thickness within a minute of boiling and begins to thin again with prolonged cooking, especially in acid. Bring it to a boil, hold it thirty to sixty seconds, and take it off.
- Acid and thickeningVinegar weakens cornstarch. If the sauce seems loose, that is why — shorten the boiling rather than adding more starch.
- The standing periodThe half hour off the heat is the point of the dish, not a delay. The beets absorb the sweet-sour sauce and the onion perfumes it. Longer is better; overnight in the refrigerator is fine.
- Butter goes in lastAdding it at the reheat, off a hard boil, gives gloss. Boiled into the sauce it just turns greasy.
- Boiling the beetsLeave an inch of stem and the root tail on and do not peel before boiling, or they bleed out their color. Whole medium beets take 35-50 minutes; the skins slip off under cold water.
- YieldA half cup of vinegar dresses roughly 2 pounds of beets, serving six as a side.
Sweet-sour beets in a cornstarch-thickened vinegar sauce are generally known as Harvard beets, a name that appears in American cookbooks from the turn of the twentieth century; the usual explanation, that it refers to the crimson of Harvard's colors, is traditional rather than documented. Church cookbooks like this one collected such dishes by the dozen, each under whatever name the contributor preferred — "Beets Supreme" here, credited twice over to Edna F. Doerschuk and Mrs. Smock. The dish earned its place because beets stored well through the winter, and a sugar-and-vinegar glaze made a cellar vegetable fit to set beside the Sunday chicken.