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Sweet Pickled Beets
Boil them in a porcelain kettle till they can be pierced with a silver fork; when cool cut lengthwise to size of a medium cucumber; boil equal parts vinegar and sugar with half a table-spoon ground cloves tied in a cloth to each gallon; pour boiling hot over the beets.-Mrs. Samuel Woods
A short, confident contributor's note that assumes you already know how to handle beets. The important details are hidden in the vessel and the syrup ratio.
- Cook the beets whole and unpeeledLeave an inch or two of stem and the whole taproot attached, and do not cut before boiling; beets bleed out their color and sweetness through any cut surface. The skins slip off under cold water once cooked. Expect 30-50 minutes for small beets, and an hour or more for large ones.
- The silver fork testSilver was likely specified because it would not discolor against acidic, staining food the way period steel did; the point is tenderness, not the metal. A paring knife or skewer that meets no resistance at the thickest part is the same test.
- "Porcelain kettle" means enamel-linedAn enameled cast-iron or stainless pot. Bare cast iron, aluminum and copper react with both beet pigment and vinegar, dulling the color and picking up a metallic taste.
- Equal parts vinegar and sugarThe text does not say whether by volume or weight; volume is the natural reading, and it makes a very sweet, very sharp syrup in the nineteenth-century style. Use 5 percent cider vinegar. If it reads as candy to you, going to two parts vinegar to one of sugar is closer to modern taste, though it is no longer the recipe as written.
- Scale the syrup downAt this recipe's proportions a gallon of syrup covers on the order of 12 lb of beets. For 3 lb of cooked beets, 2 cups vinegar, 2 cups sugar and a scant half teaspoon of ground cloves tied in cheesecloth holds the recipe's own rate of half a tablespoon per gallon. Simmer the syrup five minutes or so to dissolve the sugar and draw out the clove.
- Why the cloves are tied in a clothGround clove loose in the syrup clouds it and muddies the color. The bag also lets you pull the spice once the flavor is where you want it, though the recipe itself does not say to remove it.
- StorageThis is a refrigerator pickle as written; there is no processing step and no sealing instruction. Pack into clean jars, cover with the boiling syrup, cool, and keep refrigerated, where the beets will hold a month or more and improve after the first few days. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested boiling-water-bath procedure rather than this text.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of beets fills roughly two quart jars. Cut lengthwise "to size of a medium cucumber" points to wedges or fat batons rather than coins.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of compiled American household manuals that grew out of Estelle Woods Wilcox's Buckeye Cookery, reissued through the 1880s with regional titles and locally contributed recipes, which is why so many entries carry a woman's name attached. Sweet pickles appear throughout these books, one of several ways a fall root crop was kept palatable through winter alongside salting, drying and root-cellaring, and beets took to the treatment better than most: dense, sweet already, and holding their shape and color for months. The clove-and-sugar syrup here is the standard nineteenth-century sweet-pickle base, used with equal readiness on peaches, crabapples, watermelon rind and cucumbers. The instruction to use a silver fork assumes a cook who knew that ordinary steel would blacken against hot beet flesh.