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Sugared Beets (Tablespoons sugar teaspoon)
4 hot boiled beets 3 tablespoons butter 1½ tablespoons sugar ½ teaspoon salt Cut beets in one-fourth inch slices, add butter, sugar, and salt; reheat for serving.
The text as printed is a fragment: the beets themselves and the butter appear in the ingredient list of the original page but were dropped from this entry, and the quantities that survive are for the seasoning only. It is a finishing treatment for beets already boiled, not a method for cooking them from raw.
- What the full ingredient list would have beenThe surviving quantities cover the seasoning only, so the beets and butter would have carried their own measures in the original entry; a dressing on this scale would suit something on the order of a couple of cups of cooked beets. The salt as printed here, 1½ teaspoons, would be heavy for that quantity of vegetable.
- Beets must be cooked firstQuarter-inch raw slices will not soften in a pan of butter. Boil or roast whole unpeeled beets until tender, slip the skins off under cold water, then slice and proceed.
- Leave the root and an inch of stemTrim the tops but do not cut into the beet itself, or the color and sugar bleed into the cooking water.
- "Reheat for serving"Two or three minutes over moderate heat, turning the slices to glaze them. Longer and the sugar catches and the butter browns, which is not what is wanted here.
- Cooking time for the beetsSmall young beets take 30 to 40 minutes boiled; large winter beets can run to an hour and a half. Test with a skewer rather than a clock.
- YieldA side dish for about four, if the entry assumed something like two cups of sliced cooked beets.
Beets were a workhorse of the American winter cellar, and cookbooks of the period give them chiefly boiled, pickled, or in Harvard beets — the vinegar-and-sugar version whose name is generally traced to the color rather than to any documented connection with the college. This entry is the plainer sibling: no acid, just butter and enough sugar to underline the sweetness the root already has. That beets need help at all is a modern assumption. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the period's vegetable chapters, where one preparation is treated at length and variations follow in a line or two apiece.