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Pickled Beets
1 Tablespoon Sugar Salt and Pepper Vinegar and Water Take cold boiled beets and slice them across; make a liquid of half water and vinegar with the salt, pepper and sugar stirred in and put the beets in. This is TOMATO CATSUP for present use; kept too long they turn white. A bag of spices and a few whole cloves may be boiled with them.
A quick refrigerator pickle rather than a preserve — the original says as much when it warns the beets are "for present use." The text as printed has a compositor's error, which is worth untangling before you start.
- The stray line"This is TOMATO CATSUP for present use" is a typesetting slip — a running head or the title of the following recipe dropped into the middle of this one. Read the sentence as "This is for present use; kept too long they turn white." No tomato belongs anywhere in the dish.
- ProportionsThe only measured quantity is the tablespoon of sugar; everything else is left to judgment. For roughly a pound of cooked beets, about a cup each of vinegar and water with the tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt gives a balanced brine. A plain cider or white vinegar suits it; note that the strength of household vinegar in this period was not standardised, so modern 5 percent vinegar is an approximation rather than an equivalent.
- Cooking the beets"Cold boiled beets" assumes you already have them. Boil unpeeled with an inch of stem left on so they don't bleed out, 30 to 50 minutes depending on size, then slip the skins off under cold water and slice.
- Cold brine or hotThe recipe stirs the seasonings into cold liquid, which works but dissolves the sugar and salt slowly. Bringing the brine to a boil and pouring it over the sliced beets gives a cleaner flavour and a faster take-up; the beets are cooked already, so nothing is lost.
- SpicesThe recipe specifies only "a bag of spices and a few whole cloves"; the contents are left open. A muslin bundle of pickling spice — mustard seed, allspice, peppercorns, a piece of cinnamon and bay — is a reasonable filling. Boil it in the brine and lift it out; loose spice clouds the liquid.
- Not a canning recipeThere is no processing step here and no measured acid ratio, so this belongs in a covered jar in the refrigerator, not on a shelf. Eaten within two or three weeks it is fine; a shelf-stable version needs a tested modern recipe.
- Turning whiteThe warning matches what happens. Betanin, the red pigment, is water-soluble and migrates out of the slices into the brine, and it degrades with time, air and light, so long-kept beets go pale. It is a colour change, not spoilage, and it is the reason the book tells you to eat them soon.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. As a rough guide, a pound of beets with its brine will fill a quart jar or a little more, and serves about six as a relish alongside cold meat.
Beets pickled in vinegar are among the oldest items in the English and American preserving repertoire, appearing in household books well before this one, and they survived into the twentieth century because they are cheap, keep a while, and add colour to a plain table. What distinguishes this version is its modesty: it is not a put-by pickle for the cellar but a same-week condiment made from beets already boiled for another meal. That shows in the vagueness here: no quantity of vinegar, no timing, no yield, just the sequence and the one thing a beginner would not know, which is that the colour will not last.