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Italian Beets
1/2 cup butter 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1/2 dozen medium sized beets 2/3 cup lemon juice 3 cups hot water 1/3 cup flour Wash the beets, and put into boiling water. Cook from one to four hours, or until the skins will loosen from the beet. Put into cold water, and remove the skin. Cut the beets lengthwise through the center in about eight pieces. Make a sauce of the remainder of the ingredients given above. Mix the flour and three-quarters of the butter; add the hot water slowly, stirring constantly. Cook five minutes, and then add salt, remaining butter, and the lemon juice. Turn the beets into this sauce, and when thoroughly reheated, serve.
A butter-and-lemon sauce built on a plain flour roux, with the water the only liquid. The sharpness is the point, but the quantity of lemon is high by modern taste and worth tasting toward rather than dumping in.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a dozen medium beets is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb trimmed. The sauce is 3 cups water and 2/3 cup lemon juice thickened with 1/3 cup flour and half a cup of butter, giving something over 4 cups of finished sauce. The recipe gives no yield.
- The cooking time is not a misprintOne to four hours reflects beets of wildly different age and size. Young beets of 2-3 inches are tender in 35-45 minutes; older storage beets can genuinely take well over an hour. Test with a skewer rather than the clock, and keep them whole and unpeeled so they do not bleed out.
- Roasting is the better routeWrapped in foil at 400F for 45-60 minutes, beets concentrate rather than leach, and the skins slip just as easily after a cold-water dip. The recipe's boil is fine but gives a milder beet.
- Add the lemon off the heatTwo-thirds of a cup of lemon juice into a flour-thickened sauce will thin it noticeably if it is then boiled, since acid breaks down starch gel. Cook the roux and water for the full five minutes, pull the pan off the burner, then beat in the remaining butter and the juice.
- Taste the acid2/3 cup of lemon juice against 3 cups of water is an aggressively sour sauce by current standards. Start with half, taste, and go up. The beets' sugar carries more of it than you would expect, but not all of it.
- The roux wants a moment of cookingThe instruction to mix flour with butter and add water at once will work, but 2-3 minutes of gentle cooking before the liquid goes in removes the raw-flour taste. Do not let it color if you want the sauce pale against the beets.
- Reheating, not simmeringOnce the beets go into the sauce they need only to come back up to temperature. Held at a simmer they shed color and the sauce turns uniformly magenta.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a small wave of American books from the 1910s that took up dishes without meat for a mix of reasons, some practical and domestic, others tied to vegetarian, health or reform movements. The label "Italian" here points, loosely, at the sweet-sour handling of vegetables long associated with Italian cooking, though the classic agrodolce treatment of beets uses vinegar and sugar rather than lemon and a butter roux; the naming is the sort of general geographic gesture common in period American cookbooks and should not be traced to any particular regional dish. What is genuinely of its moment is the sauce itself, a butter-flour-water base of the kind taught in cooking schools of the era.