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Beets, Boiled
Wash thoroughly and remove the leaves, being very careful not to break off the little fibres 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 twenty-four hours in plenty of cold water before trying to cook them. Boil the beets two hours if young, four to six hours if old. Try with a fork and when tender remove, drop them into a pan of cold water and slip off the skin with the hands. Slice those to be used immediately, place in a dish seasoning with salt, pepper and butter. A teaspoon of sugar may also be added 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 sound method, but the timings belong to an era of storage beets kept in a root cellar through the winter. Trim nothing and the color stays in the beet rather than in the water.
- The hinge: leave the roots onCut the taproot or the crown and the beet bleeds into the pot, leaving it pale and the water crimson. Twist off the leaves an inch above the top and leave the tail intact.
- Timing, correctedSmall young beets are done in 25-40 minutes; large winter beets in 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Two hours will overcook most beets sold today, and the four-to-six-hour figure assumes the shrivelled long-stored cellar roots that are now rarely encountered.
- The 24-hour soakOnly relevant to beets stored loose all winter and gone leathery. Supermarket beets need nothing more than a scrub.
- TestingA thin skewer or paring knife slides in with no resistance. A fork tends to tear the skin and start the bleeding.
- Cold water dipWorth doing: the skins slip off under a little pressure once the beets have cooled a minute or two. Wear gloves or expect stained fingers.
- Reheating over boiling waterThis is a double boiler arrangement, meant to warm the seasoned slices without further cooking. A brief turn in a covered pan with the butter does the same thing.
- Salt the waterThe original doesn't, and unsalted boiled beets taste flat. A tablespoon of salt in the pot is not too much.
- YieldThe original gives none; roughly 2 lb of beets, or one large bunch, will serve about four.
- The leftover picklesCider or white wine vinegar poured over the cold sliced beets, refrigerated, keeps a week or so. This is a refrigerator pickle, not a shelf-stable canned one.
Boiled beets with butter, salt and a splash of vinegar is the plainest form of a vegetable that reached American tables both fresh in season and, later, as a keeper: beets stored well in sand or a cellar and so appeared on winter menus long after fresh greens had gone. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern company's publishing arm, aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns and The Delineator, and its vegetable chapter covers beets that are "tough and withered" as a matter of course. The optional teaspoon of sugar is a tell about the period's produce as well: a spring-bought root that had sat since October needed help. The vinegar finish, and the note about turning the remainder into pickles, reflects the era's steady habit of stretching one cooking session across several meals.