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Creamed Beets
Any left-over beets that have been served with butter and no vinegar may be creamed by way of variety. Chop them coarse, and to each cup of beets allow one cup of white sauce No. 2 (see page 68). Heat together.
A two-line recipe that depends entirely on a cross-reference the modern reader does not have. Everything else is assembly.
- White sauce No. 2Cookbooks of this era commonly numbered their white sauces by thickness, and a No. 2 is most likely the medium sauce: something in the region of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Season it with salt and white pepper before the beets go in.
- The vinegar rule is the hingeThe recipe specifies beets served with butter and no vinegar. Acid from a vinegar dressing or pickling liquid risks curdling the milk sauce, so if the leftovers are pickled or were dressed with vinegar, use them cold in a salad instead.
- Sauce-to-beet ratioCup for cup gives a very loose, soupy result by current taste. Half a cup of sauce per cup of beets coats them adequately; add more only if you want it spoonable.
- ColourBeet juice will stain the sauce pink within a minute or two of heating, and more so if the beets are chopped fine. Chopping coarse, as directed, keeps the bleeding down; fold rather than stir.
- HeatingLow heat, just until steaming. A flour-thickened milk sauce scorches on the bottom of the pan and the beets are already cooked, so there is nothing to gain from a hard simmer.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of beets and their sauce serve three or four as a side dish. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of horseradish stirred in at the end is period-appropriate and useful against the sweetness.
Leftover cookery was a genre of its own around the turn of the twentieth century, when iceboxes kept food a day or two but not much longer and waste was treated as a moral failing as much as an economic one. One method often described was to bind whatever remained in a numbered white sauce, and the numbered sauces themselves reflect the era's ambition to teach cooking as a system: learn one roux in three thicknesses and every vegetable, fish and scrap of meat in the house becomes a dish. Beets suited the approach because they keep well cooked and because a household was likely, it is often said, to have boiled more at once than a single meal needed.