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Beet-Roots Sauted in Butter
Prepare as for boiled beet-roots, and when cooked and peeled cut into heart-shaped pieces, place in a sautepan with a lump of butter, season with pepper and sprinkle over a very little loaf sugar powdered. Cook on a stove for six minutes, carefully tossing them from time to time; then arrange on a hot dish, and serve.
A short finishing recipe that assumes you already have boiled beets on hand; the whole point is the glaze that forms as butter, sugar and beet juice reduce together.
- Start with fully cooked beets"Prepare as for boiled beet-roots" refers back to the preceding recipe; the usual method of the period was to boil beets whole in their skins, with the root and an inch of stem left on so they do not bleed out, then slip off the skins while still warm. Figure roughly 35-50 minutes of simmering for medium beets.
- Loaf sugar powderedLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken off as needed; powdering it meant crushing a piece to a fine grain. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct substitute. The recipe gives no measure; "a very little" is best read as a light sprinkle, perhaps a teaspoon to a pound of beets.
- Sautepan and heatA sautepan here is a straight-sided skillet, and "cook on a stove" means over direct heat rather than in the oven. Medium heat is right: hot enough to reduce the juices to a gloss, not hot enough to brown the butter.
- Six minutes is accurateBecause the beets are already tender, the timing exists only to melt the butter, dissolve the sugar and coat the pieces. Longer and the sugar begins to catch and taste burnt.
- SaltThe original seasons with pepper alone, presumably because any salt went in at the boiling stage. If your beets were cooked unsalted, salt them in the pan.
- Heart-shaped piecesCut the peeled beets into thick slices and stamp them with a small cutter, a decorative flourish for plated service. Wedges or half-inch dice cook and glaze identically if you would rather not waste the trim.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities; about 1 1/2 lb of trimmed beets with 2 tablespoons of butter will serve four as a side dish. Serve on a warmed platter, since butter-glazed beets dull quickly on a cold one.
This recipe shows the hotel kitchen doing what French cookery did with roots generally: cook them plainly, then finish them in butter with a pinch of sugar to point up the sweetness already in the vegetable, a treatment close to what a French cook would have called glacé. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from the hotel's opening in 1893, and his 1896 book is essentially a working reference, which is why entries like this one lean on a preceding recipe rather than repeating it. The heart-shaped cutter suggests an eye for presentation, where a vegetable was expected to look composed on the dish, not merely be cooked.