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Beet Relish
1 cup chopped cold cooked beets 2 tablespoons lemon juice 3 tablespoons grated horserad- 2 teaspoons powdered sugar ish root 1 teaspoon salt Mix ingredients in order given. Canned beets may be used in place of fresh ones, and bottled horseradish if of strong flavor and well drained. This is delicious served with cold meat or fish.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting; read it as 1 cup chopped cold cooked beets, 3 tablespoons grated horseradish root, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 teaspoons powdered sugar, 1 teaspoon salt. Nothing is cooked, so the whole thing takes ten minutes once the beets are done.
- It is not a canning recipeWherever it sits in the book, there is no processing step, no vinegar and no sterile jar. Treat it as a fresh refrigerator relish and eat it within a few days.
- Powdered sugarIn this book powdered sugar means finely ground white sugar, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which carries added cornstarch. Either dissolves fine here; granulated works too if you let the relish sit twenty minutes.
- Fresh horseradishPeel and grate the root at the last moment on the finest holes of a box grater or in a food processor, and do it with the window open. The volatile compounds that give it heat begin fading within an hour of grating, and the lemon juice added promptly will hold them.
- Bottled horseradishPrepared horseradish is packed in vinegar, and some styles are creamed. Drain it hard in a sieve, press out the liquid, and reduce or omit the lemon juice, tasting as you go, or the relish turns thin and sharp.
- Cooking the beetsBoil or roast them whole with the skins on, an inch of root and stem left intact, so they do not bleed out their colour: 40 to 60 minutes for medium beets. Cool completely before chopping, as the recipe specifies cold beets.
- Canned beetsThe recipe allows them, and they work, but drain and blot them well; packing liquid dilutes the seasoning and makes a slack relish.
- Chop size and yieldA fine dice of about 1/8 inch holds together better on a plate than a rough chop. The quantities give roughly a cup, enough to serve six alongside cold roast beef, ham, or poached salmon.
Beets and horseradish are an old pairing across northern and eastern Europe, best known in the Ashkenazi Jewish beet chrain served at Passover and with cold fish, and in the German and Polish relishes that came to American tables with nineteenth-century immigration. Fannie Farmer's version, from the era when the Boston Cooking School was codifying household cookery into level measurements, is a notably restrained one: no vinegar, no long keeping, just beet, root, acid, sugar and salt, mixed in the order given. It even allows a cook to fall back on canned beets and bottled horseradish.