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Harvard Beets
1/4 C sugar 2 T flour 2 T butter 1/4 C boiling water 1/4 C vinegar Salt Boil until thick-pour over cooked beets.
Mrs. C. L. Thomson.
A standard sweet-sour beet sauce, transcribed with the fractions lost. Read every "14 C" as 1/4 cup — a quarter cup each of sugar, boiling water and vinegar, which balances correctly and matches every other printed version of this dish.
- The measurements1/4 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons butter, 1/4 cup boiling water, 1/4 cup vinegar, salt to taste. A literal 14 cups of anything would drown a bushel of beets.
- Order of mixingWhisk the flour into the sugar dry before adding any liquid, then stir in the boiling water and vinegar. Flour dropped into hot liquid on its own will lump, and this sauce is too small in volume to strain comfortably.
- Vinegar strengthCider vinegar was the common household vinegar, though home-made strengths varied; commercially sold vinegar was generally in the same range as today's 5 percent, so little or no adjustment is needed. White distilled vinegar gives a sharper, cleaner result; cider vinegar is the likelier original here.
- "Boil until thick"Two to three minutes at a simmer, stirring. The point is to cook the raw flour taste out, not to reduce the liquid — a flour-thickened sauce reaches full body almost as soon as it bubbles.
- The butterStir it in off the heat at the end rather than boiling it with the rest. It stays emulsified and gives the gloss that makes the dish.
- The beetsAbout 2 to 3 cups of cooked, peeled, sliced or diced beets — roughly 1 1/2 pounds raw, or two standard cans, drained. Let them sit in the hot sauce a few minutes off the heat so they take up the flavor.
- YieldServes four to six as a side.
Harvard beets appear in American community and domestic-science cookbooks from the early twentieth century onward, and the name is generally traced -- without documentation -- either to the deep crimson of the sauce matching Harvard's school color, or to an English tavern called Harwood's whose recipe was supposedly carried over and mispronounced. Neither story is verifiable. The dish is usually grouped with the broad family of sweet-sour vegetable preparations associated with German and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, where beets, vinegar and sugar are an old combination. Its appearance in a church fundraiser collection is typical: a settled, respectable side dish, cheap to make from a root that stored well through winter, and familiar enough that a contributor could set it down in one line and trust the reader to know what a cooked beet was.