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Pickled Beet-Roots
Slice and cut into squares as many cold cooked beet-roots as needed and place them in wide-mouthed pickle bottles; boil enough vinegar to cover them, a blade of mace, half an ounce of ginger root and a little scraped horseradish to each pint; pour in while hot and cork and tie down with wet bladder while cooling.
A pour-over vinegar pickle of the simplest kind: the beets are already cooked, and the spiced vinegar does the rest. The only real work is getting the aromatics and the vinegar strength right.
- Treat it as a refrigerator pickleNothing here sterilises the jars or processes them in a water bath, so the finished bottles are not shelf-stable in the modern sense. Keep them cold and eat them within a few weeks; if you want beets for the pantry, use a current tested canning recipe with measured processing times.
- Wet bladderA cleaned animal bladder (pig's or ox), soaked soft and tied over the corked bottle mouth, shrank as it dried and drew into a tight seal. Standard screw-band canning jars do the same job with less trouble.
- Vinegar strengthUse a straight 5% cider or white wine vinegar and do not dilute it. The acid is the only thing preserving low-acid beets, and the original assumes full-strength vinegar poured to cover completely.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed; a "blade" is one dried piece, roughly 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace if that is all you have. Whole is better here because the vinegar stays clear.
- Half an ounce of ginger root per pintThat is about 14 g of fresh ginger, or a piece the length of your thumb, sliced. Dried whole ginger root also works and gives a sharper, less perfumed heat.
- HorseradishFresh scraped root, a teaspoon or so per pint. Prepared horseradish from a jar is already vinegared and will cloud the brine; bottled horseradish sauce with cream in it is unsuitable.
- Pour hot, over cold beetsBring the spiced vinegar to a boil, then pour it over the cold cut beets and seal at once. Boiling the beets in the vinegar turns them soft and washes out the colour.
- Yield and timingAs a rough guide, about 1 1/2 lb of cooked beets will fill a quart jar and take something like 2 cups of vinegar; note that the original doses spices per pint of vinegar, so scale accordingly. The recipe gives no waiting time, but a few days lets the ginger and horseradish move into the beets.
Beets pickled in spiced vinegar appear in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English receipt books well before they became a standard American relish, and the combination of mace, ginger and horseradish here belongs squarely to that older tradition rather than to the sweet-and-sour beet pickle that later took over in the United States. Cheap root vegetables, put up in quantity, gave the cold buffet and the roast-meat service something sharp to sit beside. The instruction to tie the jars down with wet bladder is the giveaway of the era, a sealing method that vanished from home kitchens once cheap glass jars with rubber-ringed lids became widely available.