Beets have an undeserved bad reputation.
Some polling outfit recently discovered that among the ten most hated vegetables in America, beets were No. 1.
Eggplants, okra, turnips, and Brussels sprouts also make it onto the list, though if most other food is nominated, anchovies top the list.
Poor beets. Sweet, brilliantly colored, and amenable to lots of ways of preparing them, plus being fairly easy to grow, beets are nonetheless controversial. Perfectly reasonable friends of mine, fairly sophisticated in most ways, pinch their faces into a pucker and avert their gaze when asked if they’d like some beets. As nature would have it, their partners often love beets.
Raw beets and sweet potatoes grated, mixed, and fried like latkes were spectacularly delicious.
Usually, beets germinate without much fuss; slugs seem less interested in them than in the beans or carrots. (Maybe beets are slugs most-disliked vegetable, too?) One year, voles attacked my beets, chewed the plump sides of every single beet, turning each into a perfect crescent moon at every possible stage. In one way, voles are pretty ethical foragers: they don’t eat everything they see all at one time.
Beet thinnings are as good an addition to the dinner plate as a salad ingredient or cooked as one cooks chard, spinach, or kale. You won’t find thinnings at the supermarket but sometimes they are still attached to smaller beets at farmers markets and of course home gardeners get to eat them, too.
I grew up eating beets. Mom made Harvard beets, named for their crimson color, Harvard’s official color. She sliced beets into a sauce of sugar and vinegar thickened with a little cornstarch. Sometimes she cut beets up cold and tossed them with mayonnaise and onion for a salad. Sometimes we ate them with just butter, salt, and pepper. I like them diced up and sprinkled among salad greens.
In adulthood, I discovered pickled beets. For a while Islesboro had a 4-H club and on two different occasions, I walked about a dozen youngsters through beet pickling. I boiled beets raised at the school garden and the kids finished the process.
Slipping small beets out of their skin by squeezing them turned out to be a hilarious proposition, partly because the beets slithered out of their skins and partly because little fingers turned an eye-popping purple, perfect for chasing their friends threateningly around the room.
Pushing beets into canning jars and topping them with sugar and vinegar pickling syrup, then processing them in a hot water bath proved so satisfying: a row of jars with gorgeous, pickled beets inside.
Beets’ purple color is one reason some cite as their reason for disliking them, the cook especially whose fingers are dyed. Eating them when the vegetable is at the end of the fork is a whole other matter, more acceptable. One friend declared that he tried them when he was a youngster and decided then that they were bleah. A suggestion from me, that now he is an adult, perhaps his tastes have changed was greeted with great skepticism.
We so often roast vegetables nowadays and so beets, peeled and cubed up, oiled and roasted until crisp outside, get the treatment. My young friend Autumn, another childhood beet eater, does them that way along with broccoli, potatoes, and carrots and doesn’t care if neighboring vegetables end up with purple spots.
Historically, the Yankee descendants of English settlers ate them boiled or pickled. Oddly, historic beet soups are virtually non-existent among English speakers. Eastern Europeans serve perfectly delicious borscht; Yankees don’t and I don’t know why.
There are recipes now for beets grated and folded into chocolate cake batter. I ate raw beets and sweet potatoes grated, mixed, and fried like latkes which were spectacularly delicious.
One of the best modern ways I’ve discovered for serving beets is to boil them, cut them into thick slices, and then drench them in butter into which you crumble lots of blue cheese. Arrange them in a baking dish and run them under a broiler until the cheese begins to melt, then serve.
Divine. How could you possibly say anything bad about a beet with butter and blue cheese on it?
Eh, never mind. I know the answer to that question.
Sandy Oliver is a food historian who gardens, cooks, and writes on Islesboro. She may be contacted at SandyOliver47@gmail.com.
