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Beets
Wash the beets, being careful not to break the skin; cover them with boiling water and boil until tender. Remove from the fire; drop into cold water and rub off the skins. Cut the beets into thin slices or chop them if not young; season with salt, butter and pepper and serve at once.
A plain boiled-beet recipe whose only real technique is protecting the skin so the color and sugar stay in the root. Everything else is timing.
- Leave the root and an inch of stem"Careful not to break the skin" is the hinge. Trim the leaves an inch above the crown and leave the tap root intact; any cut lets the pigment and sweetness bleed into the water and gives you pale, flat beets.
- Boiling timesThe recipe gives none. Small beets under 2 inches take 25-35 minutes, medium 40-50, large or storage beets up to an hour and a half. Test with a skewer through the thickest part rather than a fork, which tears the skin.
- Cold water is for peeling, not coolingThe plunge into cold water loosens the skins so they slip off under your thumbs. Do it while the beets are still hot enough to be awkward to handle, and wear gloves if you care about your fingernails.
- "Chop them if not young"Older beets have a tougher, more fibrous core and coarser grain; chopping breaks that up where slicing would leave stringy discs. Mature beets also benefit from a little acid at the table, a spoonful of vinegar or lemon.
- Salt the water, not just the beetsSalt -- The original seasons only at the end. Salting the cooking water is sometimes suggested, but with the skin left whole, as here, little salt reaches the flesh; the seasoning is effectively done at the table.
- Butter quantityUnspecified, as it often is in books of this vintage. About 1 tablespoon per pound of cooked beets is a workable amount.
- YieldA pound of beets, roughly 3 medium roots, serves three to four as a side. Cooked whole and unpeeled, they keep four or five days refrigerated and can be sliced cold for salad.
Boiling beets whole in their skins is among the more traditional and conservative ways to handle the root, and it survives in home cookery precisely because a beet is a bleeder: the betalain pigments that make it red are water-soluble, so any breach in the skin costs you both color and sweetness. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century American cookbooks sold as ring-bound or interleaved volumes so a cook could add her own cards, and the vegetable section here is terse enough to assume the reader already knew how long her own beets took. The instruction to chop rather than slice older roots may reflect a kitchen in which tender summer bunches and tough winter storage roots were treated as effectively different vegetables, though that is an inference rather than anything the recipe states.