Beet Salads
1. Cut cold cooked beets into half-inch dice; mix with shredded lettuce leaves or watercress, and serve on whole lettuce leaves, covered with French dressing. 2. Arrange alternate layers of cold cooked beets and hard-boiled eggs on a bed of lettuce leaves, and sprinkle over the top a little finely-chopped onion. Serve with French dressing. 3. Arrange alternate layers of cold cooked beets and cabbage, finely chopped and well mixed with Mayonnaise or cooked salad dressing. Serve on lettuce.
Three variations on one idea, written for a cook who already knows how to boil a beet and shake up a French dressing. What follows fills in the assumptions the original leaves out.
- Cooking the beetsThe recipe begins with beets already cooked and cold. Whole unpeeled beets with an inch of stem left on take roughly 40-60 minutes in boiling water depending on size; the skins slip off under cold running water. Some cooks prefer to roast them, which concentrates the sugar, though the original assumes boiled beets.
- French dressing meant vinaigretteIn a book of this period French dressing is oil and vinegar in roughly three to one, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion. It is not the sweet orange bottled product that took the name later.
- Cooked salad dressingThe alternative to mayonnaise in version 3 is boiled dressing: egg yolks, vinegar, a little flour or cornstarch, mustard, sugar and milk, thickened over hot water. It was the household standby before commercial mayonnaise was common, and it is tarter and less rich.
- BleedingDice the beets and dress them separately, then assemble at the last moment. Beets stain lettuce, egg white and mayonnaise pink within minutes, which is fine in the layered versions but muddies the shredded-lettuce one.
- Onion quantity"A little finely-chopped onion" is left undefined; a scant tablespoon for four servings is about right. A mild sweet onion or the white of a scallion works better than a strong yellow one against the sweetness of the beet.
- Cabbage cutFor version 3 the cabbage should be shredded fine on a mandoline or with a knife, not grated, or it goes watery under the dressing. Salting it briefly and squeezing it dry keeps the dressing from thinning.
- YieldThe original specifies no quantities. About a pound of cooked beets, three or four eggs where called for, and a small head of lettuce would give four modest salad-course servings.
Beets came to the salad bowl gradually. Through the nineteenth century they were often pickled and kept in a crock, or served hot with butter, though dressed cold beetroot salads appear in nineteenth-century English and French cookery well before 1900; what the rise of the composed cold salad in American cookery around the turn of the twentieth century changed was the popularity of cooked beetroot on a bed of lettuce with a dressing over it, not its invention. The three numbered variations here are typical of how instructional cookbooks of the era were written: one basic idea, then permutations on it, so the cook learned a method rather than memorizing a dish.