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Beets
Clean these nicely, but do not pare them, leaving on a short piece of the stalk. Then put over to boil in hot water. Young beets will cook tender in an hour; old beets require several hours boiling. When done, skin quickly while hot; slice thin into your vegetable dish, put on salt, pepper and a little butter; put over a little vinegar and serve hot or cold.
A plain boiled beet, dressed in the dish rather than in a pan. The instructions still work; only the timings and a few details want comment.
- Leave the beet wholeThe point of not paring them and leaving a short piece of stalk is to keep the cut surfaces closed so the colour stays in the beet rather than bleeding into the water. Twist the leaves off rather than cutting, and leave the tail root intact.
- TimingAn hour suits small young beets; larger ones want longer, and the "several hours" applies to the big storage beets of a winter cellar, which few people now buy. Test with a skewer through the thickest part rather than by the clock.
- Skinning while hotThis is the hinge. The skins slip off under a thumb the moment the beets come out of the water and become stubborn as they cool. Drain, run briefly under cold water so you can hold them, and rub the skins away in a bowl or with gloves — the stain is real.
- VinegarCider or plain white wine vinegar suits it; a tablespoon or so for four beets. Acid in the cooking water slows the beet from softening, so it goes in at the dish rather than the pan.
- The greensThe book assumes you know what to do with the tops. If they are fresh, wash and wilt them like chard; they are the better half of a young bunch.
- YieldA bunch of five or six young beets dressed this way serves four as a side, and is arguably better the next day cold from the refrigerator, which the recipe already allows for.
Boiled beets dressed with butter, salt and vinegar is a long-standing vegetable preparation in English and American cookery. Nineteenth-century households grew beets partly because they store: buried in sand or a root cellar they held through winter, and the recipe's distinction between "young" and "old" beets marks the difference between early summer from the garden and February from the cellar. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1876) was a compiled charity cookbook, its receipts contributed by named local women. The sugar beet industry was only beginning to establish itself in the United States around this period; the beet on this page is strictly the table variety, valued for colour and keeping rather than sweetness.