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Beets
Scrub beets, but do not break skin. Cook in boiling water - young beets about an hour, old beets until tender. Slip skins off as soon as taken from stove. Serve hot with butter, salt and pepper. Serve cold beets for garnishing potato salad.
A plain boiled-beet method that still works; the only real technique is keeping the skins intact so the color and sugar stay in the root.
- Don't break the skinLeave an inch of stem and the whole taproot attached, and scrub rather than peel or trim. Any cut lets the pigment and sugars bleed into the water, leaving pale, flat-tasting beets.
- TimingThe book gives about an hour for young beets and simply 'until tender' for old ones; in practice small young beets the size of a golf ball are often tender well before that, so test with a skewer through the thickest part rather than going by the clock.
- Slipping the skinsThe instruction to skin them straight off the stove is the hinge of the recipe. Drain, run cold water over them just until you can handle them, and the skins rub off with a thumb or a paper towel. Once cold they cling and need a knife.
- StainingBeet juice sets on wood and porous plastic. Peel on a plate or under running water, and rinse the board immediately.
- An alternative the book doesn't giveRoasting whole beets wrapped in foil at 400F for 45 to 60 minutes concentrates the sugars in a way boiling cannot. The peeling step is the same.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon about 1 1/2 lb of untrimmed beets to serve four as a hot vegetable, rather less if they are going cold into a salad.
- The greensThis recipe says nothing about the tops, but beet leaves cook like chard. Wash well and wilt in a covered pan with a little butter for a few minutes.
Lowney's was published by a chocolate company, the Walter M. Lowney Company, and sold as much to promote the brand as to teach cooking; its vegetable chapter runs to terse, utilitarian entries like this one. Boiled beets were a winter staple in the Northeast, where the roots stored well in a cellar for months; "old beets" here simply means the tough, storage-hardened ones of late winter, as against the tender summer crop. The suggestion to slice cold beets over potato salad is often said to reflect the German and Scandinavian influence on turn-of-the-century American cooking, where pickled or plain boiled beets regularly appeared alongside potatoes and a dressed egg.