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Pickled Beets (Cups boiling water tablespoons)
2 cups boiling water 4 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon pepper 1 stick cinnamon 2 cups vinegar 1 tablespoon salt 10 cloves 10 peppercorns Boil the beets as usual; peel and cut them into slices; place in glass jar. Mix the sugar, salt, pepper and spices in the water; add vinegar and heat almost to the boiling point. Pour this over the beets and allow them to stand twenty-four hours before serving.
A quick vinegar pickle rather than a preserve — the beets are cooked first and the hot spiced brine simply steeps them overnight. The points below cover the pieces the original leaves unsaid.
- Not a canning recipeNothing here is processed in a boiling-water bath, and the brine is diluted half-and-half with water, so the finished jar is not shelf-stable. Treat it as a refrigerator pickle: cool, cap, chill, and eat within two or three weeks.
- Heat the brine, don't boil it"Almost to the boiling point" looks deliberate: bring the spiced vinegar to just under a boil, not a hard rolling boil, and pour it over the beets at once.
- Quantity of beetsThe recipe gives no weight. Four cups of brine will cover something in the region of 2 to 2 1/2 lb of trimmed, sliced beets; pack them snugly and top up so all the slices are submerged, allowing jar space for both beets and brine.
- Boiling the beets "as usual"Leave an inch of stem and the whole root tail on and do not peel before cooking, or the colour bleeds into the water. Simmer 30-45 minutes depending on size; the skins slip off under cold water.
- Vinegar strengthPeriod vinegar varied in strength; modern bottled vinegar is typically around 5 percent acidity. Cider or white wine vinegar suits the spicing, though the recipe specifies only "vinegar."
- Whole spices, whole clovesTen cloves and ten peppercorns go in whole; the recipe never says to strain them out. Note that the ingredient list also carries 1/2 teaspoon of pepper in addition to the peppercorns; halve it if you want the spice to read as cinnamon and clove rather than heat.
- The 24-hour restThis is the hinge. Sliced beets need the full day in the cold brine the recipe calls for to take on the sugar and acid; served the same afternoon they taste like boiled beets in vinegar.
Beets pickled in spiced vinegar are a long-established kitchen-garden preserve in English and northern European cookery, valued because the root stores well through winter and because acid helps hold its colour. The formula — sugar, salt, cinnamon stick, cloves and peppercorns in half-diluted vinegar — is close to the domestic-science proportions common in American manuals of the period, and reflects a moment when cookbooks were giving measured cups and tablespoons in place of older handfuls and teacupfuls.