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Pickled Beets
Slice cold boiled beets and cover with vinegar.
Beets, Sour Sauce Wash beets, and cook in boiling salted water until soft. Drain, and reserve one-half cup water in which beets were cooked. Plunge into cold water, rub off skins and cut into cubes. Reheat in Sour Sauce. Melt two tablespoons butter, add two tablespoons flour, and pour on the beet water. Add one-fourth cup, each, vinegar and cream, one teaspoon sugar, one-half teaspoon salt, and a few grains pepper.
Two short recipes run together here: a refrigerator pickle and a buttered sour sauce for hot beets. Both are simple, but Farmer's compression leaves out the quantities and keeping times a modern cook expects.
- This is a refrigerator pickle, not a canned one"Cover with vinegar" produces a fresh pickle meant for the cold cellar and quick use, not a shelf-stable preserve. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and use within two weeks; the recipe gives no processing, headspace or acidity measurement, so it should not be treated as canning.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar in 1896 was commonly cider vinegar, often homemade and of variable strength, though probably in the same broad range as today's 4-5 percent. Plain distilled white vinegar gives a sharper, cleaner pickle; cider vinegar is nearer the original.
- Cooking the beetsLeave an inch of stem and the root tail on and do not peel before boiling, or the color bleeds into the water. Small beets take 30-40 minutes, large ones an hour or more; the skins slip off under cold water as described.
- Reserve the water before you drain it awayThe sour sauce depends on the half cup of beet cooking water for both liquid and color. It is easy to lose it at the sink, so set a cup under the colander first.
- The sauce is a small roux sauceTwo tablespoons each butter and flour to about a cup of total liquid gives a fairly thick sauce. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before adding the beet water, and add the liquid gradually to keep it smooth.
- Add the cream and vinegar off the boilFarmer lists them together, but the acid will curdle cream held at a hard boil. Thicken the sauce with the beet water first, then stir in the vinegar, cream, sugar, salt and pepper and heat through gently.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of beets. The sauce as written makes roughly a cup of liquid, enough to coat about a pound and a half of cubed beets, or four servings.
Beets boiled, skinned and dropped into vinegar are a long-established form of household pickling in Northern Europe, and versions of it reached New England kitchens through both English and German cooking. The sour sauce here is the more telling of the two: butter and flour thinned with the vegetable's own cooking liquor, then sharpened with vinegar and softened with cream and a little sugar, resembles the sweet-sour beet dishes often associated with German and Pennsylvania Dutch tables.