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Baked Beet-Roots
After washing thoroughly place in a rather slow oven and when done serve hot with butter, pepper and salt. If baked whole they will probably require about eight hours to cook well.
The Preparation of Beet-Roots for Table Choose the small, smooth varieties; wash and clean them without cutting or scraping and boil for one to two hours, dependent upon their size. Allow them to cool and then peel, cut into slices and serve in a glass dish; or they may be mixed in a salad.
Two methods in one entry: whole beets baked dry in a slow oven, and the older boiled-and-sliced preparation. Both hinge on the same point, that the skin stays unbroken until the beet is cooked.
- Do not cut or scrapeThis is the instruction that matters. Beets bleed from any cut surface, losing both colour and sweetness into the pan or water. Wash them, leave an inch of stem and the root tail intact, and peel only after cooking, when the skins slip off under a thumb.
- "A rather slow oven"The book gives no temperature; in period usage a slow oven is somewhere around 250 to 300F. The recipe allows about eight hours for beets baked whole. At 300F expect 2 to 3 hours for medium beets; at 400F, wrapped in foil, closer to an hour.
- Test for donenessA thin skewer should meet no resistance at the centre. Old beets and large ones can stay hard well past the point where the outside is soft.
- Boiling timesThe recipe gives one to two hours according to size, for the small smooth beets it specifies. Small beets of 2 to 3 inches are done in 30 to 45 minutes.
- "Small, smooth varieties"The recipe specifies small and smooth and gives no reason. Baby beets and the standard round red types both work; larger storage beets are best baked rather than boiled.
- ServingThe hot version is served, as the recipe says, with butter, pepper and salt. For the cold sliced version the entry specifies only a glass dish or mixing into a salad, and says nothing about a dressing; vinegar or oil-and-vinegar is a natural addition.
- YieldAllow one medium beet, about 5 oz, per person as a side dish.
Beets were a winter staple of the American table long before they were a restaurant vegetable, keeping for months in a cellar and needing nothing but heat. The long slow bake described here belongs to the age of the coal range, which is often said to have held a low steady heat for hours after the day's cooking was finished, so that eight hours may have cost little but patience. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, gathers a great many such plain household preparations alongside the hotel's elaborate dishes; the sliced beets served cold in a glass dish reflect the period's fondness for showing off colour at table, a beet being one of the few vegetables that could supply it.