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Beetroot and Potato Salad
Boil three medium, red beetroots in two quarts water with a teaspoon salt for an hour and a half, remove, plunge in cold water and pull off skin with the fingers while in water. Lift up, lightly drain, cut in halves, then finely slice and place them in a salad bowl with three medium, peeled boiled potatoes cut in same way as the beets. Season with four tablespoons French dressing, mix well and serve.
A simple two-vegetable salad that depends almost entirely on the beets being cooked through and the dressing going on while the vegetables are still warm.
- Beet cooking timeNinety minutes suits large, mature winter beets. Medium beets of the sort sold today are usually tender in 40-50 minutes; test with a skewer rather than watching the clock. Trim the tops to an inch and leave the root tail on so they do not bleed out into the water.
- The salted waterTwo quarts with a teaspoon of salt is barely seasoned by modern standards, and little of it penetrates a whole unpeeled beet. The seasoning that matters is in the dressing.
- Slipping the skinsThe cold-water plunge is the hinge of the recipe. Beets peel most easily while hot or just-cooled, and the skins come away under water without staining hands or board.
- Dress the vegetables warmRoot vegetables absorb vinaigrette as they cool. Combine and dress while the beets and potatoes are still above room temperature, then let the salad sit twenty minutes before serving.
- Potato choiceUse a waxy variety -- Yukon Gold, red-skinned, fingerling -- boiled in their skins and peeled after. Floury baking potatoes disintegrate when sliced thin and tossed.
- French dressingIn a book of this period this means a plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, not the sweet orange bottled product sold under that name in America today. Four tablespoons is about a quarter cup.
- YieldThree beets and three potatoes make four side servings. It holds well for two days refrigerated, though the potatoes turn uniformly magenta.
Beet-and-potato salads run right across northern and eastern Europe, where both crops store through the winter in a cellar and can be boiled with no more equipment than one pot. The version here, dressed simply with oil and vinegar, is the French and central European treatment; add onion, pickled cucumber, herring or sour cream and the same base belongs to the Russian and Scandinavian family of salads that includes rosolli and the various vinegret mixtures. Filippini's book gathers dishes from across Europe for American cooks, and this entry is typical of what such collections offered in the early twentieth century: a cold vegetable dish that could be built from cheap keeping crops and served as a first course when salad greens were out of season.