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Beet Greens
Carefully wash and clean young beets. Leave roots and tops together, cutting off only tips of leaves. Put them into a kettle half filled with salted, boiling water, and allow them to cook for half or three-quarters of an hour. Drain as dry as possible in a colander. Serve hot with butter, salt and pepper, or with vinegar. They may also be cooked and chopped fine like spinach.
BRUSSELS-SPROUTS-Pick off the dead leaves from the sprouts, soak the latter in cold water for one-half hour, wash them, and put them on the fire in plenty of slightly salted boiling water. Boil rapidly in an uncovered saucepan until tender, fifteen to twenty minutes being usually long enough. Drain in a colander. Put the saucepan back on the stove with a little butter. When hot put in the sprouts, season with salt and pepper and serve very hot.
Two vegetable dishes from the same page, both built around long boiling in an open kettle. The times are the only real obstacle: modern taste, and modern varieties, want a fraction of them.
- Cut the times hardYoung beet greens with their thumb-sized roots attached are tender in 8 to 12 minutes, not half to three-quarters of an hour. Greens alone need 3 to 5 minutes. The long boil here produces the olive-drab, sulfurous result that gave boiled vegetables their reputation.
- Brussels sproutsFifteen to twenty minutes leaves modern sprouts grey and strong-smelling. Halved sprouts are done in 5 to 7 minutes in boiling water; sprout varieties sold today are generally milder than older ones and want less cooking.
- "Young beets" means thinningsThe recipe assumes beets pulled from the row while the roots are marble to golf-ball size, sold now as bunched baby beets. Full-grown beets have coarse leaves and a root that will still be raw when the greens have collapsed; in that case separate them and cook the roots first.
- The uncovered pan is deliberateThe uncovered pan -- The recipe calls for an uncovered saucepan and plenty of water for the sprouts (the beet-green instruction says nothing about a lid). Boiling uncovered is usually explained as letting volatile sulfur compounds escape rather than condense back into the water; keep the lid off for the sprouts, as directed.
- Drain thoroughlyBeet greens hold an enormous amount of water in their stems. Press them in the colander or the butter will slide off and the dish will be soupy on the plate.
- Finishing the sproutsReturning the drained sprouts to a pan with hot butter is a good instruction and worth keeping. Give them a minute or two over the heat so the surfaces dry and brown slightly.
- YieldNeither recipe states quantities. Reckon a pound of untrimmed beets with tops, or a pound of sprouts, for three to four servings as a side dish.
Beet greens are the older half of the vegetable: beets were grown for their leaves long before the swollen root was bred up into the crop we know, and chard is essentially the same species kept in its leafy form. That is why the book compares the greens to spinach and suggests chopping them the same way, and why vinegar appears as an alternative to butter, a treatment often applied to assertive pot-herbs. The instruction to leave roots and tops together belongs to a kitchen supplied by a garden rather than a store, where beets were thinned as they grew and the pullings went straight into the pot. Brussels sprouts, by contrast, were still a relative novelty in American cooking, which may be why the editors bother to explain that dead leaves come off first and that soaking is worthwhile.