Beet Salad
Six red beets, vinegar, one cucumber, one root of celery, French dressing, parsley, lettuce.
Boil new red beets. Take off the skin while warm, cut off the stem end and scoop out the center, leaving a wall half an inch thick. Cover with vinegar and stand aside over night. Just before you wish to serve chop the cucumber and celery; mix and fill the beets. Arrange on lettuce leaves and pour over a French dressing. Sprinkle with finely chopped parsley and serve.
A stuffed-beet salad that depends almost entirely on the overnight vinegar soak; skip it and the beets are merely boiled vegetables holding a filling.
- "One root of celery""One root of celery" most likely means celeriac, though in some writing of the period "a root of celery" meant a head of ordinary celery, and the recipe's later instruction says only "celery." Peel and dice about half a medium celeriac raw, or substitute two or three trimmed celery ribs, accepting a milder, wetter result.
- Beet size"New red beets" means young ones, but they need to be big enough to hollow once you allow the half-inch wall; something around 2½ to 3 inches across gives a useful cavity, and very small beets leave little to fill.
- BoilingLeave an inch of stem and the root tail on and do not cut the skin, or the colour bleeds out. Young beets take 30 to 45 minutes; test with a skewer at the thickest point.
- Peeling warmThe instruction is exact and worth following. The skin slips off under the thumb while the beets are still hot; once cold it clings and tears the flesh. Wear gloves or accept stained hands.
- Hollowing outA melon baller or a small teaspoon works better than a knife. Keep the scooped centres — chopped fine, they can go into the cucumber and celeriac filling rather than the bin.
- The overnight vinegarThis is the hinge. The beets sit covered in plain vinegar overnight; the recipe says only "stand aside," though refrigerating them is sensible now. Cider or white wine vinegar suits the dish as well as sharp distilled vinegar. Drain and blot them before filling.
- Filling at the last momentCucumber weeps salt-free water within minutes of being cut and dressed. Chop it, mix with the celeriac, and fill the beets only as the salad goes to the table, or the whole plate floods.
- French dressingIn this period the term usually meant oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar; some period versions did also take mustard.
- YieldSix stuffed beets serve six as a first course or side salad, one to a plate on a lettuce leaf.
Stuffed vegetable salads of this kind belong to the era of the composed salad, when the arrangement on the plate mattered as much as the eating. Pickled beets themselves are far older, and hollowing a firm boiled vegetable to serve as its own cup was a common trick of late nineteenth and early twentieth century cookery — tomatoes, cucumbers and beets all got the treatment. "One root of celery" is a period marker: celeriac appeared in European and American salad cookery of the time, and became less familiar in Anglo-American kitchens later.