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Harvard Beets
Wash twelve small beets, cook in boiling water until soft, remove skins, and cut beets in thin slices, small cubes, or fancy shapes, using French vegetable cutter. Mix one-half cup sugar and one-half tablespoon corn-starch. Add onehalf cup vinegar and let boil five minutes. Pour over beets, and let stand on back of range one-half hour. Just before serving add two tablespoons butter.
A straightforward sweet-sour glazed beet, and the only real technique is patience at the end. The half hour of standing is where the beets take up the syrup.
- Beet size and cooking time"Twelve small beets" means roughly 2 lb of beets an inch and a half to two inches across, which is about 40 to 50 minutes at a simmer. Modern supermarket beets are often much larger and can take 60 to 90 minutes; test with a skewer rather than the clock, and leave an inch of stem and the root tail on so they do not bleed out.
- Back of the rangeA coal or wood range had a cool zone at the rear where a pan would stay hot without simmering. Use the lowest burner setting, a heat diffuser, or simply cover the pan and set it aside off the heat for the half hour.
- VinegarCider vinegar was widely available in this period and suits the dish; distilled white is sharper and more one-note. If your vinegar is much stronger than 5 percent acidity, cut it with a little water.
- The cornstarchHalf a tablespoon in half a cup of vinegar gives a light glaze, not a gravy. Whisk it into the dry sugar first, as written, or it will lump the moment it hits the vinegar. Five minutes of boiling is enough to cook out the raw starch taste.
- Butter at the endThe two tablespoons of butter go in off the heat, swirled until it disappears. Boiling it in will split the glaze and dull the shine.
- French vegetable cutterA cutter for shaping vegetables into fancy forms; garnishing cutters sold today do the same job. Thin rounds or small cubes taste identical.
- Yield and seasoningServes six to eight as a side. The original calls for no salt at all; a good pinch stirred into the syrup keeps the sweetness from taking over.
- Make aheadThis is better after a night in the refrigerator, and it reheats gently without harm. Add the butter after reheating rather than before storing.
Harvard beets appear in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century, though nobody has ever pinned down the name. The most commonly repeated explanation is that the deep red of the finished dish matched Harvard crimson; a rival story traces it to an English tavern called Harwood's, spelled loosely by later cooks. Both are traditional rather than documented. What is certain is the technique: a sugar-and-vinegar syrup thickened with cornstarch is the same sweet-sour treatment nineteenth-century American cooks gave to cucumbers, cabbage and pickled fruit, and beets took to it particularly well because their own sugar content is so high. The dish belonged to the era when a boiled vegetable was expected to arrive at table dressed in something, and it survived into the twentieth century.