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Vegetables (If old four or five hours)
if old, four or five hours, trying with a fork to see when tender; take out, drop in a pan of cold water, and slip off the skin with the hands; slice those needed for immediate use, place in a dish, add salt, pepper, butter, and if not very sweet a tea-spoon sugar, set over boiling water to heat thoroughly, and serve hot with or without vinegar; put those which remain into a stone jar whole, cover with vinegar, keep in a cool place, take out as wanted, slice and A few pieces of horse-radish put into the jar will prevent a white scum on the vinegar. Or, roast in hot ashes, or bake in oven, (turning often in the pan with a knife, as a fork causes the juice to flow), and when tender, peel, slice, and dress with salt, pepper, butter and vinegar. Or, after beets are boiled and skinned, mash together with boiled potatoes, and season to the taste with salt; add a large lump of butter (do not use any milk); place in a dish, make a hole in center in which put in a generous lump of butter; sprinkle with pepper and serve at once. This is a New England dish, and very delicious for harvest time, when beets are young and sweet.
This entry begins mid-sentence — the opening line, which would have said to wash the beets and boil young ones, has been lost. What survives is a full set of instructions for cooking, dressing, pickling and mashing beets.
- The missing first lineThe text picks up at "if old, four or five hours," so the preceding direction was to boil young beets for a shorter time. Modern equivalents: young beets 30 to 45 minutes, large storage beets 1 to 2 hours. Four or five hours reflects field beets held in a root cellar since autumn and is far longer than anything sold today needs.
- Do not cut the skinThe recipe itself tests boiling beets with a fork, but it warns against the fork when baking them: turn them in the pan with a knife, "as a fork causes the juice to flow." Pierced beets do bleed and go pale and watery, so keep the skin unbroken while roasting.
- Slipping the skinsThe cold-water plunge works exactly as described; the skins come away under thumb pressure. Beet juice stains, so do it in the sink and expect pink hands for a day.
- Roasting temperatureFor the oven method, 400F for 45 to 60 minutes, wrapped loosely in foil or covered in the pan, gives what the original calls tender. "Roast in hot ashes" means burying them in the banked embers of a wood fire, an uncontrolled heat that cannot be equated to an oven setting.
- The stone jarA stone jar is a glazed earthenware crock — any glass or non-reactive container does. Use undiluted cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity, cover the beets completely, and keep the jar in the refrigerator rather than a cool cellar. These are refrigerator pickles, not canned goods: there is no seal, no processing, and they should be eaten within two or three weeks.
- The horseradishThe white scum the recipe wants to prevent is a surface yeast or mold that forms on brines kept at cellar temperature. Refrigeration prevents it more reliably than horseradish, though a few slices add a good sharpness.
- Sugar and vinegarA teaspoon of sugar was insurance against a beet that was not very sweet, as the recipe says. Modern beets are bred sweet, so taste before adding any. The vinegar is offered as a choice, not a requirement: the recipe says to serve "with or without vinegar."
- The mashed versionRoughly equal weights of boiled beets and boiled potatoes, mashed together with butter and no milk, as instructed — milk turns the color a muddy lavender and loosens the texture. Serve immediately; it stiffens and dulls as it sits.
- YieldThe original gives none. Two pounds of beets serves four as a side dish; for the mash, a pound of beets and a pound of potatoes with 3 to 4 tablespoons of butter feeds four to six.
Beets earned their place in nineteenth-century American cookery less for the table than for the cellar: they store well, keep their sugar through winter, and take vinegar readily, which is why this entry moves without comment from a hot dish to a crock of pickles. The mashed beet-and-potato dish at the end is claimed here as a New England one, and it belongs to the same regional habit that produced red flannel hash — beets and potatoes cooked together until the whole plate turns pink. That a Southern-titled book carries a dish flagged as New England is characteristic of The Dixie Cook-Book, which was Estelle Woods Wilcox's rebranding of her Buckeye Cookery material, issued for the Southern market by L. A. Clarkson & Co. of Atlanta, drawn from the same pool of contributed and reprinted receipts that fed her other compilations, then dressed in local branding. The instruction not to pierce the beet with a fork is genuine old kitchen knowledge, repeated in cookbooks for a century and still worth following.