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Young Beets, Boiled
Beets Butter Salt and Pepper Wash beets very clean, but neither scrape or cut them. Put them in boiling water, and according to their size boil them from one to two hours. Skin when done, season with pepper, salt and a little butter. Beets are very nice baked but require a much longer time to cook.
A plain boiled beet, and the instructions are sound as far as they go. The points below fill in what the original assumes a cook already knows.
- Do not cut themThe insistence on leaving beets whole and unpeeled is the hinge of the recipe. Any break in the skin bleeds colour and sugar into the water and leaves the flesh pale and flat. Trim the stalks to about an inch above the crown and leave the root tail intact.
- TimingOne to two hours suits the large storage beets of a period kitchen garden. Genuinely young beets of two inches or less are tender in 25 to 40 minutes; test with a skewer through the thickest part rather than watching the clock.
- Skinning"Skin when done" works because the skins slip off under light pressure while hot. Drain and cover with cold water for a moment, then rub the skins away with your thumbs or a paper towel. Beet juice stains hands and wooden boards.
- Salt the waterThe recipe seasons only at the end. A well-salted pot seasons the beet as it cooks and does no harm to the colour; a splash of vinegar in the water helps hold the red.
- Baking, as mentionedThe closing note is worth taking up. The original gives no oven temperature and expects baking to take considerably longer than the one-to-two-hour boil, which suits large storage roots; for modern beets, whole and unpeeled wrapped in foil at 400F for 50 to 75 minutes concentrates the sugars more than boiling does.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon about 1 1/2 lb of beets for four as a side dish, with roughly a tablespoon of butter.
- The greensThe recipe deals only with the roots. If the leaves are fresh, wash and wilt them in butter separately; they cook in a few minutes and are a distinct dish from the roots.
Beets earned their place in older American cookery as much for their keeping qualities as their flavour: buried in sand in a cool cellar, the mature roots lasted the winter, which may be why so many older recipes budget one to two hours of boiling for a vegetable most cooks now buy small and tender. The distinction the title draws between "young" beets and the rest would have been a real one in a household that grew its own, marking the thinnings and early pullings of summer against the storage crop lifted in autumn. The garden beet itself is a selection of the same species as chard and the sugar beet, and the sweetness that makes it worth roasting is the same sugar that drew European agronomists to the crop as a cane substitute. The brisk practicality here -- wash, boil, skin, butter, and a single line acknowledging that baking is better if you have the time -- suits a reader with access to a garden or a market stall rather than a year-round supply.