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Boiled Beets
Wash and scrub, but do not cut the beets. Cover with boiling water and allow to boil fifteen minutes. Place in cooker for two hours or more, depending upon the age of the beets. Remove from cooker; put beets in cold water for a minute; slip off the skins, and cut the beets in small pieces. Season with salt, pepper and butter, or any sauce you may prefer. To retain the color of the beets leave on the root and about one half inch of leaves.
This is a retained-heat recipe: the beets get a short hard boil on the stove, then finish in an insulated box with no further fuel. Everything about the method follows from keeping the roots intact so they do not bleed.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, packed with hay, felt or asbestos, sometimes with a soapstone disc heated on the range and set in with the pot. Food was brought to a boil, sealed in, and left to coast down over hours. There is no dial and no fuel burned once the lid is shut.
- Modern equivalentA heavy lidded pot brought to a boil and moved to a 200-215F oven for two hours works the same way, as does a slow cooker on low. If you have neither, simply simmer the whole beets covered on the stove: 30 to 45 minutes for small ones, up to an hour and a half for large late-season beets.
- The instruction that mattersDo not cut, peel or trim the beets before cooking. Every break in the skin lets the pigment leach into the water, which is why the recipe insists on leaving the root tail and half an inch of stem. Scrub with a brush rather than a knife.
- Timing by age"Two hours or more, depending upon the age of the beets" is the whole difficulty of the method. June beets the size of golf balls will be done well inside two hours; storage beets the size of a fist may want three or four. Test with a skewer through the thickest part.
- Slipping the skinsThe cold-water dip is largely for handling: after a minute the beets are cool enough to hold and the skin rubs off between thumb and finger. Work while they are still warm, as the recipe's one-minute dip implies.
- Sauces the period had in mind'Any sauce you may prefer' left the choice open. Period options for beets included Harvard beets (a sweet-sour vinegar and sugar glaze thickened with cornstarch), a plain cream sauce, or simply butter with a splash of cider vinegar.
- YieldNo quantity is given in the recipe. As a working figure, about 1 1/2 to 2 lb of untrimmed beets, five or six roots, will serve four.
Fireless cookery had a serious following in American households between about 1900 and the First World War, promoted in cookbooks and home-economics pamphlets as a way to cut coal and to keep a summer kitchen cool: you fired the range once, boiled the pot hard, then shut it into an insulated chest and went about the day. Root vegetables were ideal candidates, since they tolerate long slack cooking and need no watching. The advice to leave the root and a stub of stem attached is older than the cooker itself and is common, though not universal, in nineteenth-century vegetable cookery, where a pale, bled beet seems often to have been thought a sign of careless handling. Commercial fireless cookers largely disappeared with cheap gas and electricity, though the principle came back in the electric slow cooker and, more recently, in insulated vacuum pots.