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Beets
Wash the beets thoroughly and remove the leaves, being very careful not to break off the little fibers and rootlets which retain the juices and coloring matter. Use plenty of water in cooking. Should the beets be tough and withered, soak them for twentyfour hours in plenty of cold water before trying to cook them. Try with a fork, and when tender drop them into a pan of cold water and slip off the skins with the hands. If small, serve whole. If large, slice those to be used immediately, place in a dish and season with salt, pepper, and butter or butter substitute or savory fat. A teaspoon of sugar may be added also if the beets are not naturally sweet enough. Set them over boiling water to heat thoroughly and serve hot, with or without vinegar. The cold beets left over may be covered with vinegar and used as pickles.
A plain boiled-beet method that assumes you know how long beets take; the instructions are mostly about keeping the color in the vegetable rather than in the water.
- The hinge: leave the beet intactTrim the tops to about an inch of stem and leave the tail root and rootlets alone, as the recipe insists. Any cut through the flesh lets the pigment bleed out and you finish with pink water and pale beets.
- Cooking time, which the original omitsSmall beets of 2 inches take 30 to 45 minutes at a steady simmer; large ones an hour to an hour and a half. Test with a thin skewer through the thickest part rather than a fork, which tears the skin.
- Butter substitute and savory fatThis dates the book to the era of margarine and rendered drippings as everyday cooking fats. Butter, olive oil or bacon fat all work; beef or bacon drippings are closest to what "savory fat" meant.
- The 24-hour soakThis was a way to revive shriveled storage beets in an unrefrigerated pantry. Modern beets rarely need it, and if you do soak them that long, keep them in the refrigerator rather than on the counter.
- Set over boiling waterThe dish of dressed slices goes over a pan of simmering water — a double boiler arrangement to reheat without further cooking. A low oven or a covered pan over the lowest flame does the same thing.
- Roasting insteadWrapped in foil at 400F for 45 to 60 minutes concentrates the sugar and makes the added teaspoon of sugar unnecessary. The skins slip off the same way after a cold-water dunk.
- Don't throw the leaves outThe greens the recipe removes are good eating — wash well and wilt in the fat you would have used on the roots, with a splash of the vinegar mentioned at the end.
- The vinegar leftoversBeets covered in vinegar are a refrigerator pickle, not a preserve. Keep them cold and eat within a week or two; nothing here is processed for shelf storage.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of beets, trimmed, serves four as a side dish.
The garden beet, Beta vulgaris, was valued in American kitchen gardens as a cheap root that kept comparatively well in a winter cellar, and a number of older cookbooks accordingly treat it as a cold-weather standby as much as a summer vegetable. The instruction to leave the rootlets unbroken recurs frequently in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery writing, and reads as received kitchen wisdom passed from book to book. The closing note — dress the surplus with vinegar and call them pickles — fits a household economy in which cooked food was not wasted, and pickled beets were a long-established fixture on the American relish plate. The reference to "butter substitute or savory fat" suggests a text of roughly the First World War period or after, when butter was scarce or dear and cookbooks often wrote alternatives into the ingredient line.