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Beet Salad
Use canned or cold cooked beets, cut in dice. Moisten with mayonnaise or French dressing, and season well with salt, pepper, paprika and small amount mustard. Serve in round mounds on shredded lettuce.
A straightforward icebox salad that depends almost entirely on how well the beets are drained and how sharply they are seasoned.
- Drain the beets hardThis is the hinge: diced beets carry a lot of liquid, and any of it left behind will thin the dressing into pink slurry. Drain in a sieve, then blot dry with a towel before dressing.
- Dice sizeAim for roughly 1/2-inch cubes. Smaller pieces bleed faster and will not hold the mound shape the recipe asks for.
- Mustard quantity"Small amount mustard" probably means dry mustard powder, though the recipe does not say so; something on the order of 1/4 teaspoon for a pound of beets is a safe starting point. Prepared mustard works but adds vinegar, so cut back on any acid in the dressing.
- Which dressingFrench dressing here means the old plain oil-and-vinegar mixture with salt, not the sweet orange bottled kind sold under that name now; period proportions vary, with something in the region of three parts oil to one of vinegar being common. Mayonnaise gives a paler, milkier result once the beet colour bleeds into it.
- Dress close to servingBeets in mayonnaise turn uniformly magenta within an hour or so. If you want a clean look, season the beets and dress them just before they go onto the lettuce.
- Shaping the moundsPack the dressed dice into a small teacup or ramekin and invert onto the lettuce for a neat dome. Chill both the beets and the lettuce first.
- YieldA can of beets of about a pound, or two large cooked ones, should give roughly four modest salad-course portions; the recipe states no yield.
Beet salad of this kind was a staple of American menu planning in the first half of the twentieth century because it solved several problems at once: the beets could be canned or left over, the dish held in the icebox, and the colour did work that no other cheap vegetable could do on a plate of pale lettuce and cream dressings. Paprika, called for here as a seasoning rather than a garnish, was widely used in this period as a way of adding warmth and colour without heat.