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Boiled Beets
Wash, and cook whole in boiling water until soft; time required being from one to four hours. Old beets will never be tender, no matter how long they may be cooked. Drain, and put in cold water that skins may be easily removed. Serve cut in quarters or slices. 4 hot boiled beets 3 tablespoons butter
A plain boiling method from Fannie Farmer's era, with one crucial detail buried in the first line: the beets go in whole and unpeeled.
- Do not cut them firstLeave the skin on, the root tail intact, and about an inch of stem. Any breach in the skin bleeds colour and sugar into the water and leaves you with pale, watery beets.
- The time rangeOne to four hours reflects beets of wildly different ages and sizes. Small young beets can be done in 30-40 minutes, and modern medium to large beets usually in an hour or so, though very old or very large roots can take considerably longer. Test with a skewer at the thickest point rather than watching the clock.
- "Old beets will never be tender"Still true. Beets that have gone woody or fibrous in storage stay woody. Look for firm roots with no soft shoulders or deep surface cracks.
- The cold-water plungeThis is the hinge of the recipe. Once drained and dropped into cold water, the skins slip off under thumb pressure with no peeling at all. Do it while the beets are still hot; if they cool fully in the skin the trick works less well.
- The trailing ingredient line"4 hot boiled beets, 3 tablespoons butter" is the finish, not part of the boiling. Slice or quarter the peeled beets and toss with the butter; the original specifies no seasoning, though salt and pepper would be usual.
- YieldThe original gives no serving count; four medium beets would make a side dish for three or four.
- StainingBetanin stains hands, wooden boards and cloth. Use a glass or ceramic bowl for the cold water and peel under running water if it matters.
Boiled beets appear in the vegetable chapter of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks such as the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, as one of a long series of terse, method-first entries. Beets were a staple of the American root cellar, cheap and keeping well through winter, which is why the book bothers to warn that age defeats cooking time. The species is Beta vulgaris, the same plant as chard and sugar beet, and the swollen red root appears to have been bred up for the table in early modern Europe before becoming a fixture of nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens. The buttered-and-sliced finish here is the plainest of several treatments; the boiled beet was also the starting point for pickling and for Harvard beets, both of which assume you have already done exactly what this page describes.