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August 20
Menu: Corned Beef; Buttered Potatoes; New Beets; Lettuce, Italian Dressing; Tapioca Cream; Coffee New Beets-Peel hot cooked beets, cut into slices, and toss about for 3 or 4 minutes in saucepan which contains 3 tablespoons Crisco to which has been added 1 teaspoon plain vinegar, or a few drops of tarragon, 2 cloves, and 1 teaspoon sugar.
A quick glazed beet side from the day-by-day menu calendar at the back of the Crisco book. The whole dish is a two-minute finish on beets that are already cooked.
- Crisco, and what to use insteadCrisco was then a newly launched all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, promoted as a neutral stand-in for butter and lard. Three tablespoons of butter or a mild olive oil will do the same job here and taste better; the recipe is a glaze, not a pastry, so the fat's structure is irrelevant.
- "Peel hot cooked beets"Boil or roast the beets whole and unpeeled until tender, then slip the skins off while they are still hot -- they come away under a paper towel or gloved thumb. Cold beets fight the peeler and bleed.
- "A few drops of tarragon"This most likely means tarragon vinegar, a common bottled flavoured vinegar of the period, offered as an alternative to the teaspoon of plain vinegar rather than in addition to it. If you have no tarragon vinegar, use plain vinegar with a pinch of chopped fresh tarragon.
- The clovesTwo whole cloves, not ground. They perfume the fat in the pan; fish them out before serving or warn whoever gets one.
- Keep it to three or four minutesThe beets are already cooked, so this is only long enough to coat them and let the sugar and vinegar reduce to a gloss. Longer over heat and the slices slump and weep colour into the pan.
- Quantity and yieldThe recipe gives no quantity of beets. Three tablespoons of fat and a teaspoon each of vinegar and sugar would dress about a pound of cooked beets. Salt is not mentioned and the dish needs it.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length advertisement for a product introduced two years earlier: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, shelf-stable solid that behaved like lard but came from no animal. The recipes, credited to Marion Harris Neil, were written to prove Crisco could do everything butter, lard and suet did, which is why a plain dish of buttered beets appears here with the butter swapped out. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a full menu to every day of the year -- this one belongs to August 21. Glazing cooked beets in fat with vinegar and sugar is much older than the book and appears across nineteenth-century English and American cookery under names like buttered beets.