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Beet-Roots with Cream
Boil some beet-roots, peel and let them become cold, then slice and put in a stewpan with a little good stock. Beat up the yolk of an egg with one quart of good cream and stir into the stock in which the beet-root has been warmed. Serve on a dish with the sauce poured over it.
A short Waldorf side dish written in the shorthand a professional kitchen could fill in for itself. Two things need attention: the cream quantity, which is almost certainly a misprint, and the fact that an egg-thickened sauce must never boil.
- The cream is out of proportionOne quart of cream bound with a single egg yolk will not thicken and will drown any reasonable quantity of beets. For six to eight medium beets, a cup of cream with one yolk gives a sauce that coats. If you want to follow the original ratio, scale the yolks up to four or five per quart.
- Never let it boilThis is the hinge. Once the yolk-and-cream liaison goes into the stock, keep the pan below a simmer — around 170-180F — and stir until it thickens. A boil curdles the yolk and you get grainy pink liquid instead of sauce.
- "Beet-roots" and "stewpan"Simply beets; "beet-root" was the ordinary period term for the root as opposed to the leaf. A stewpan is a wide, shallow saucepan — anything broad enough to hold the sliced beets in a layer or two works.
- Boiling the beetsLeave an inch of stem and the root tail on and do not peel before boiling, or the color bleeds into the water. Medium beets take 35-50 minutes; the skins slip off easily once cooled.
- "A little good stock"Only enough to warm the slices in, not enough to make a soup; a few tablespoons will do. A well-made stock with some gelatin in it helps the sauce cling.
- Cooling mattersThe instruction to cool the beets before slicing is practical: hot beets tear and smear. Cold ones cut into clean rounds, and they reheat quickly in the stock.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity of beets and no yield. Salt at the end, since the stock and cream both concentrate, and a few grains of white pepper or a scrape of nutmeg is in keeping with the period.
Beets in cream belong to the plain vegetable repertoire of the late nineteenth-century hotel kitchen, where a boiled root was routinely dressed with a liaison of egg yolk and cream — the same thickening used for veal blanquette and countless white sauces. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, is largely a working compendium rather than a set of signature creations, and entries like this one are written for cooks who already knew that an egg-bound sauce is finished off the boil. Beets themselves were a kitchen-garden staple in America by then, cheap and storable through winter, and the cream sauce was the standard way to lift a homely root onto a hotel table.