Home › Salad Dressings › Stuffed Beets (Boil new beets of even size)
Stuffed Beets (Boil new beets of even size)
Boil new beets, of even size, until tender. Set aside for some hours, or over night, covered with vinegar. When ready to serve, rub off the skin, scoop out the centre of each to form a cup, and arrange the cups on lettuce leaves. For each five cups chop fine a cucumber. Make a French dressing of two tablespoonfuls of oil, half a tablespoonful (scant) of vinegar, one-fourth a teaspoonful, each, of paprica and salt. Stir the dressing into the cucumber and fill the beets with the mixture. Of the beet removed to form the cups, cut slices and stamp out from these stars or other
A stuffed-salad course from the era when a cold plate was expected to be built rather than tossed. Nothing here is difficult, but the beets need a long unattended head start.
- Start a day aheadStart ahead -- the recipe allows "some hours, or over night" in vinegar. The steep seasons the beet through and firms it, which makes hollowing easier; the longer end of that range gives the more thoroughly seasoned cup.
- Boiling the beetsLeave an inch of stem and the root tail on and do not peel before boiling, or the colour bleeds out. Small new beets take roughly 30-45 minutes at a simmer; test with a skewer at the thickest point.
- "Rub off the skin"This works only while the beets are still warm or on beets young enough to have papery skins. If they have gone cold in the vinegar and resist, pare them thinly with a knife rather than gouging at them.
- Hollowing the cupsA melon baller or a half-teaspoon measure cuts a neater cup than a paring knife. Leave a wall about a quarter-inch thick; any thinner and the cup slumps under the filling.
- PapricaAn older spelling of paprika. In American recipes of this period paprika was generally the mild sweet sort, used as much for colour as for heat, so a quarter teaspoon in two tablespoons of oil makes a vivid dressing rather than a hot one.
- The dressing ratioTwo tablespoons oil to a scant half tablespoon vinegar is about 4:1, sharper-sounding than it eats because the beets themselves are already acid from the steep. Whisk the salt and paprika into the vinegar first so they dissolve.
- The cucumberPeel, halve and scrape out the seeds before chopping, then drain the chopped flesh in a sieve for ten minutes. Cucumber sheds a surprising amount of water and will otherwise thin the dressing and flood the cups.
- Yield and the cut-off endingThe dressing quantity given is scaled to five beet cups. The text breaks off mid-sentence at "stars or other"; the sense is that the scooped-out beet is sliced and stamped into stars or other shapes, presumably as a garnish, but the page does not say where they go.
Stuffed vegetable cups were a staple of the American "fancy salad" of the 1890s and 1900s, when salad was understood as an exercise in construction: a lettuce leaf as the plate, something hollowed as the vessel, and a stamped-out garnish to show the cook had taken trouble. Beets suited the fashion perfectly because their colour did the decorative work on its own, and pickling them in vinegar is often said to have been common enough in the household that the cups arrived pre-seasoned. The dressing is a plain French dressing in the sense the period used the term, oil and vinegar with salt and a red pepper, and paprika's appearance here reflects its spread through American cookbooks around the turn of the century, sometimes described as a milder and prettier substitute for cayenne.