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A Dainty Salad
A dainty looking salad is served in beet shells. Boil round beets of uniform size, being careful not to break or pierce the skins until they are taken from the water-this in order to preserve their color. When they are tender, remove from the kettle and plunge them into cold water; peel them, cut a thin slice from the bottom of each, so that it will stand, remove a slice from the top and carefully scoop out the inside without breaking the wall; make a mixture of the diced beet, cold boiled potato and celery, and dredge it with a French dressing; fill the shells, put a teaspoonful of mayonnaise dressing on the top of each and place them on crisp white lettuce leaves.
A straightforward composed salad whose only real difficulty is the hollowing. Everything hinges on cooking the beets whole and unbroken so they hold their colour and their walls.
- Unpierced skinsLeave an inch of stem and the whole taproot on, and do not trim or prick the beet before boiling. Cut beets bleed their pigment into the water and end up pale and slack-walled.
- Boiling timeMedium beets of about 2½ inches take 35-50 minutes at a steady simmer; test with a skewer through the stem end rather than the body. Uniform size matters more here than usual, since one overcooked beet will collapse when scooped.
- The cold plungeDropping them into cold water is not just for handling — the skins slip off under thumb pressure while the flesh is still warm. Wear gloves or accept stained hands.
- HollowingTake the top slice generously and work with a melon baller or a narrow teaspoon, leaving a wall about a quarter-inch thick. The recipe cuts the base slice first, though you may find it easier to cut it last so you can judge how it sits.
- "Dredge it with a French dressing"Dredge here means to coat or dress lightly, not to flour. French dressing in this period generally means a plain vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper — printed ratios vary from about two to three parts oil to one of vinegar, and some versions add paprika — rather than the sweetened, tomato-tinted bottled dressing the name later came to mean.
- Diced fillingCut potato, celery and the scooped beet to a small even dice, about a quarter-inch. Dress the potato while it is still slightly warm so it takes the vinaigrette, then fold in the beet last to keep the colour from running through everything.
- MayonnaiseA period mayonnaise is raw-yolk, hand-beaten and thick enough to hold a teaspoonful on top without sliding. Commercial mayonnaise works, and is the safer choice if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- Yield and timingFigure one beet shell per person as a first course or side. The beets can be boiled and hollowed a day ahead and kept covered in the refrigerator; fill them no more than an hour before serving or the shells weep.
Serving food back in its own hollowed-out skin was a staple of turn-of-the-century American table display — tomato cases, orange baskets, cucumber boats and beet shells all appear in the salad chapters of the period, when the salad course is often said to have been a recent enthusiasm in middle-class households and was judged largely on how it looked. Beets suited the purpose better than most: cheap, firm enough to carve, and a colour nothing else on the table could match, at a time when a plate of white lettuce and pale mayonnaise wanted some relief. The instruction to boil them unpierced is generally reckoned to predate this book and is still repeated in modern kitchens, one of the small pieces of technique that survived intact while the elaborate presentation around it fell out of use.