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Beets
Remove leaves, wash clean, being careful not to break off the little fibers and rootlets, as the juices would thereby escape and they would lose their color; boil in plenty of water, if young, two hours, serve.
A single sentence of instruction that gets one thing exactly right and one thing badly wrong. The handling advice is sound; the timing belongs to an era of larger, older, tougher beets.
- Leave the beet wholeThis is the hinge, and the original is right about the root end: do not break off the tail root or the little rootlets. A pierced beet bleeds into the water and comes out pale and flat-tasting. (The recipe says only to remove the leaves; standard practice is to cut the stems an inch or so above the crown rather than into it.)
- Two hours is far too longSmall young beets of 1½ to 2 inches are tender in 25 to 35 minutes; medium beets take 40 to 50. Test with a thin skewer through the thickest part. Two hours produces grey, waterlogged flesh.
- Why the old time was so longLarger, denser roots months out of the ground do take much longer; a 1 lb winter beet genuinely can take well over an hour. Note, though, that the recipe itself specifies two hours "if young," so the figure is generous by any modern reckoning.
- Water and salt"Plenty of water" means enough to cover by an inch or two; salt is not mentioned in the recipe but does no harm. Acid in the pot is sometimes recommended to keep the color bright, though whole unbroken beets hold their color well enough without it.
- Peel after cookingThe recipe skips this, but boiled beets are meant to be slipped out of their skins once cool enough to handle. Wear gloves or accept stained hands.
- ServingThe recipe stops at "serve"; hot, sliced or quartered, with butter, salt and pepper is the usual treatment, and a splash of cider vinegar is period-appropriate. Reckon about 1½ lb of untrimmed beets for four as a side.
- Do not discard the leavesThe greens the recipe removes are good eating, cooked like chard in a little fat with garlic. Beet tops were eaten as greens in this period, though this entry does not say so.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the late nineteenth-century wave of large American compilation cookbooks, and its vegetable chapter is written in the terse reference style of the period: assume the cook knows what a boiled beet looks like, and give only the point she might get wrong. Beets had been kitchen-garden staples in the South and elsewhere since the colonial period, valued because they store well through winter in sand or a root cellar, which is why so many old recipes assume a large, dense root rather than the small tender ones sold today. The instruction to preserve the rootlets and skin intact appears in household manuals well before this book; the advice survives because it is simply true. Beets were also eaten pickled in vinegar, and the sugar beet, developed in Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made the same plant a major industrial crop during the very decades this book was assembled.