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Pickled Beets
Wash and boil six medium sized beets until tender. Remove skins; slice or cut into quarters; cover with 1/2 cup vinegar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper and 1 tablespoon sugar. Serve hot or cold.
A quick vinegar dressing rather than a preserve, despite the name. Nothing here needs translating so much as clarifying, since the original leaves out both timing and the fact that this will not keep on a shelf.
- Not a canning recipeThere is no sterilising, sealing or processing here, and the vinegar quantity is nowhere near enough to preserve anything. Treat it as a dressed vegetable to be kept covered in the refrigerator and eaten within about five days.
- Boiling the beetsMedium beets take 35 to 50 minutes in boiling salted water, depending on age and size. Leave an inch of stem and the root tail intact and do not cut into them before cooking, or the colour bleeds into the water; the skins then slip off under cold running water.
- Vinegar to useCider vinegar was widely used in American kitchens of the period and suits beets well. Modern bottled vinegar is standardised at about 5 percent acidity; home or bulk vinegar of the period could vary, so taste before adding more.
- Half a cup will not cover themThe instruction to "cover" six beets with half a cup of vinegar is optimistic. Either slice thin and pack tightly into a small jar or bowl so the liquid rises over them, or stretch the liquid with an equal part water and adjust the salt and sugar upward.
- Give it timeSliced hot beets absorb the dressing well, but the flavour is thin in the first half hour. Several hours or overnight in the refrigerator makes a real difference, and this is one dish that is better on the second day.
- YieldSix medium beets serve four to six as a side dish.
Beets were among the most reliable winter vegetables in the American cellar, keeping for months in sand or sawdust, and vinegar seems to have been a common way to wake them up by February. Recipes like this one occupy a middle ground between a true pickle, which was brined and sealed for the year, and a plain boiled vegetable: the sugar-salt-vinegar dressing is essentially a quick pickle, a technique that long predates the name it now goes by. The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of a great many free or nearly free promotional cookbooks that food manufacturers distributed in the early twentieth century. Such books padded out their leavening-heavy cake and biscuit chapters with short, unbranded household staples like this one, which made the volume useful enough to keep on the shelf.