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September 11
Menu: Oysters au Gratin; Sirloin Steak, Anchovy Sauce; Duchesse Potatoes; Buttered Beets; Red Cabbage and Celery Salad; Apricots Parisienne; Coffee Buttered Beets-Boil 1 dozen small beets in plenty of water and when tender put into cold water, slip peeling off of them, cut them in thin slices and put in saucepan with 4 tablespoons Crisco, pinch of salt and little pepper. Add before they are quite hot 1 tablespoon vinegar.
A straightforward hot buttered-beet dish, written for a shortening that had only just gone on sale. A few notes on quantities and the one step that decides the result.
- Crisco, and what to use insteadCrisco is a flavourless hydrogenated vegetable shortening; here it does nothing that butter would not do better, and the dish is called buttered beets. Four tablespoons for a dozen small beets is a generous amount of fat by modern standards.
- A dozen small beetsSomewhere around 2 lb of trimmed beets, depending on how small "small" is taken to be; enough for about six as a side dish.
- Boiling timeThe recipe gives none. Small beets, left whole with an inch of stem and the root tip intact, take 30 to 45 minutes at a simmer; test with a skewer at the thickest point rather than by the clock.
- The cold-water stepThe recipe specifies it: the dip in cold water makes the beets cool enough to handle and loosens the skin so it slips off in one motion.
- Add the vinegar off the boil"Before they are quite hot" is the hinge: the vinegar goes in as the beets are warming through rather than into a fiercely hot pan, and a little acid helps hold the colour.
- Vinegar typeCider vinegar suits beets better than distilled white, which can dominate at a full tablespoon.
- Don't cook them againThe saucepan stage is warming and coating only, two or three minutes. Beets held over heat in fat go soft and lose their edge.
This entry belongs to The Story of Crisco, the recipe booklet Procter & Gamble issued to introduce its new hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, which reached American grocers in 1911. The book is arranged as a sequence of dated menus, which is why an unremarkable vegetable side carries a date stamp of September 12 and four tablespoons of shortening where butter would ordinarily be named. Beets were a late-summer and autumn staple in this period, cheap and keeping well in a cellar. The heading "Coffee" is a fragment of the surrounding menu, not part of the dish.