Beetroot, Boiled
INGREDIENTS. -Beetroot, boiling water. AVERAGE COST, 2d. each.
When large, young, and juicy, this vegetable makes a very excellent addition to winter salads, and may easily be converted into an economical and quickly-made pickle. (SeeBEET- ROOT, PICKLED.) Beetroot is more frequently served cold than hot; when the latter modeispreferred, melted butter should be sent to table with it. It may also be stewed with button onions, or boiled and served with roasted BEETROOT. onions. Wash the beets thoroughly; but do not prick or break the skin before they are cooked, as they would lose their beautiful colour in boiling. Put them into boiling water, and let them boil until tender, keeping them well covered. If to be served hot, remove the peel quickly, rubbing and not cutting it off, cut the beetroot into thick slices, and send to table with melted butter. For salads, pickle, &c., let the root cool, then peel and cut it into slices.
TIME.-Small beetroot, 1½ to 2½ hours; large 2 to 3 hours.
SEASONABLE.-May be had at any time.
A straightforward method whose one real rule — keep the skin intact — still holds. The timings and the sauce, however, both need translating.
- Do not cut the beetThe hinge of the recipe: any nick in the skin lets the pigment (betanin) bleed into the water and leaves you with pale beets and crimson cooking liquid. Trim the leaves an inch above the crown and leave the tapering root tail on.
- The times are longOne and a half to three hours reflects older, larger, coarser winter roots. Supermarket beets of 2–3 in. across are tender in 30–45 minutes; large ones may take an hour. Test with a skewer through the thickest part rather than watching the clock.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn Beeton this means the standard English melted-butter sauce — butter thickened with flour and water rather than simply butter run in a pan. A modern equivalent is a thin bechamel, or plain butter with lemon and salt if you would rather not bother.
- Rubbing off the skinAfter boiling, the skin slips off under cold running water with thumb pressure. Wear gloves or accept stained hands for a day; the dye is harmless but persistent.
- Roasting is the better modern routeWrapped in foil at 400F for 45–75 minutes, beets lose less colour and sugar than they do to boiling water. The recipe's logic — sealed skin, cook whole, peel after — is unchanged.
- Cost and season"2d. each" is Victorian retail pricing and tells you only that beetroot was cheap. "Seasonable: may be had at any time" reflects how well the root keeps in a cellar through winter.
- YieldReckon one medium beet per person as a hot vegetable, rather less if it is going into a salad or pickle.
Beetroot reached English kitchens as a garden vegetable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, later than the leaf beets and chard grown for their tops, and by the Victorian period it was firmly a winter salad and pickling vegetable rather than a hot dish — which is exactly what this entry says. Beeton's insistence that it "is more frequently served cold than hot" matches the pattern of nineteenth-century English tables, where cold sliced beetroot in vinegar was standard alongside cold meat and salad. The suggestion to stew it with button onions or serve it with roasted onions points back to an older tradition of treating the root as a proper cooked vegetable. The same species, Beta vulgaris, was by Beeton's day also being bred in Europe for sugar, an industry that had grown rapidly after Napoleonic-era blockades cut continental Europe off from cane.