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Boiled Beet Greens
Wash thoroughly and scrape roots, cutting off ends.
Drain, and cook one hour or until tender in a small quantity boiling salted water. Season with butter, salt, and pepper. Serve with vinegar.
A four-line recipe that assumes you bought beets pulled young, with the small roots still attached to the leaves. Two things need adjusting: what "beet greens" meant then, and how long they need.
- What you are buyingThe recipe scrapes and trims roots because beet greens of this period were commonly sold as thinnings — whole young plants with the small roots still attached. Supermarket greens are usually topped from mature beets, so you will only have leaves and stems, and there is nothing to scrape.
- The hour is for the roots, not the leavesModern bunched greens are tender in 5 to 8 minutes of boiling. An hour reduces them to olive-drab sludge and leaches out most of the flavour. If you do have marble-sized roots attached, give them a 10-minute head start and add the leaves at the end.
- Stems and leaves separatelyBeet stems are far tougher than the blades. Strip the leaves off, boil the chopped stems a few minutes first, then add the leaves for the last two or three.
- "A small quantity boiling salted water"About an inch in a wide pot, salted like pasta water. The greens throw off a good deal of their own liquid; drain and press them well before dressing, or the butter will slide off.
- Grit"Wash thoroughly" is doing real work here. Beet leaves hold sand in the crinkles — a full sink of cold water, lift the greens out rather than pouring off, and repeat until the bottom of the sink is clean.
- The vinegarNot a garnish so much as the point. Cider vinegar at the table cuts the earthy sweetness of the leaves; add it after cooking, since acid in the pot sets the fibres and dulls the colour.
- YieldA pound of untrimmed greens cooks down to roughly two modest side servings.
Beet greens belong to a long tradition of eating the whole plant, and in nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens they were a by-product of thinning the beet rows in late spring — the seedlings pulled to give the rest room became the first green vegetable of the year, weeks before the roots were ready. Cookbooks of the period tend to treat them as one of a family of boiled "greens," all handled much the same way. Chard is in fact the same species, Beta vulgaris, bred for leaf rather than root, which is why the two taste so much alike. The very long cooking times given for greens throughout books of this period reflect older, coarser varieties, and may also reflect — though this is a reading rather than a documented fact — a general conviction, not confined to vegetables, that thorough boiling was a form of hygiene.