Beets
Wash, but do not cut them; cook in boiling water until tender. Young beets will cook in one hour and a half; old beets require much longer time, and if tough, wilted or stringy, do not cook them; they will never boil tender. When cooked, put them in a pan of cold water and rub off the skin. Young beets are cut in slices and served hot with butter, pepper and salt, or cut in small cubes and served in a white sauce; a little vinegar and sugar may be added to the sauce if desired. They may be pickled in vinegar, spiced or plain, and served cold, or they may be cut into dice and mixed with other vegetables and served as a salad with any dressing desired.
A method entry rather than a fixed formula, and most of it still holds. The timings are the part that has aged.
- Leave them wholeThe instruction not to cut them is the hinge of the whole thing. Beets bleed from any cut surface, so trim the tops to about an inch, leave the taproot and skin intact, and the colour and sweetness stay in the root rather than in the water.
- An hour and a half is longSmall young beets of two or three ounces are tender in 25 to 40 minutes; larger ones take an hour or more. Test with a skewer at the half-hour mark rather than trusting the clock. The book's figure reflects older, larger storage beets more than anything sold as "young" today.
- On tough or wilted beetsThe warning is sound. A beet that has gone woody or dehydrated in storage has lignified fibre that boiling will not soften, and no amount of extra time helps.
- SkinningThe cold-water dunk is mainly to make the hot beets handleable; cooking is what loosens the skin. Rub it off with your thumbs or a paper towel, and wear gloves unless you want stained hands for a day.
- White sauceA period white sauce is a roux of roughly a tablespoon each butter and flour to a cup of milk, seasoned. The suggested vinegar and sugar turn it into a mild sweet-sour sauce, sweet-sour in the same register as Harvard beets though those use no milk; add the vinegar off the heat so the milk does not curdle.
- PicklingThe recipe gives no processing times or acidity measurements, so do not treat it as a canning recipe. Handle it as a refrigerator pickle: sliced cooked beets covered in vinegar with sugar and whole spices, kept cold and eaten within a couple of weeks.
- Roasting insteadWrapping whole beets in foil and roasting at 400F for 45 to 60 minutes concentrates the sugars in a way boiling cannot, and the skins slip just as readily.
- YieldReckon about a pound and a half of untrimmed beets for four as a side dish. The greens, which the book ignores, are worth cooking like chard.
Beets were a plain winter vegetable in American household cookery, cheap and long-keeping in a root cellar, which is why the entry reads as a set of options rather than a single dish: boil the whole crop, then dress the results hot with butter, in white sauce, pickled, or in salad as the week goes on. The garden beet had been bred up for size and sweetness in Europe over the preceding century alongside the sugar beet, whose sugar content was identified in the mid-1700s and commercialised in German-speaking Europe from about 1800, and the two are the same species. The vinegar-and-sugar white sauce noted here is sweet-sour in the manner of what New England cooks called Harvard beets, a name whose origin is not documented.