Select very red beets without being stringy; cook them either in water, or by steam, or else in the oven; do not cut off either the stalk or root until ready to use. Peel and put them into an earthen or stone crock, and cover them over with vinegar. They may also be seasoned with salt and cloves, or else salt and carraway seeds. Cut them in slices and arrange on a side dish, pouring a little vinegar over.
A refrigerator pickle rather than a preserve: beets cooked whole, steeped in vinegar, then sliced to order. The one instruction that matters is leaving the beets intact until they are cooked.
Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in a long run of cold side dishes -- artichoke bottoms, molded butter -- the small savoury items set out along the table at the start of a formal meal, what a French menu would call hors-d'oeuvre. Pickled beets were an old northern European habit that arrived in American kitchens by several routes at once; the caraway variant is often said to point toward German and Austrian practice, the cloves toward the English spiced-vinegar tradition, though these attributions are inference rather than established fact. The instruction to leave root and stalk attached is the kind of detail that marks a professional book: it is a working cook's answer to the problem of beets that boil out pale, and it remains the standard advice in kitchens today.