Bert Greene on beetroot (beets)

ROBUST AND RED-BLOODED

Thus does one of my favourite cooks describe beetroot, but it could equally well be a description of the man himself.

It's lucky dip day and I picked on of my very favourite books. It's very home-town/country American, but it has some wonderful recipes in it. The page I picked was of recipes for beetroot, and I shall focus on just one 'Tangy Minted Beets'.

I've done beetroot before so I shall try not to repeat myself. Suffice to say that when I got this book (the 80s?) beetroot was not particularly popular, and you definitely never peeled it before cooking, but today it is very popular and lots of the recipes you find ask you to peel and grate it before use. Just shows you how times change.

Bert Greene, being American, of course, calls them beets and he gives us fourteen different ways of cooking them, including two versions of Borscht and one of the classic American 'Red Flannel Hash'.

Bert Greene is dead now - I think he was just a little younger than my mother, and he grew up in the time of the Depression in the American countryside somewhere. His book is full of homely tales of his childhood and in this chapter he recounts how his formidable mother and grandmother would extort the very best price when shopping from the overwhelmed greengrocers. And beetroot was a cheap vegetable. And therefore maligned.

But back to 'Tangy Minted Beets'. It's one of several recipes in which the beetroot are first boiled (or baked - he gives us Marcella Hazan's method of baking them in foil), and then finished off in some kind of sauce. But he prefaces this recipe with a little bit of advice about growing them - for the book also tells you how to grow the vegetables, their nutritional value, their history and other little titbits. It's a good read. This is what he tells us about growing beetroot:

"In my garden, beets grow in a sunny tract that is otherwise overrun with headstrong mint. The connection is my design. Long ago I discovered that leaf miners (insects that devastate garden greens) abhor the scent of mint and avoid that patch like the plague.

My tender beets are therefore unsullied, and as a reward I season them with lots of fresh mint."

TANGY MINTED BEETS

(The quantities are non-metric - you will need to convert them. Sorry I'm being lazy today.)

1 1/2 pounds, beets, trimmed, 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, 1 shallot, minced, 1/3 cup apple jelly, 2 tablespoons chopped mint, 2 teaspoons lemon juice, salt and freshly-ground black pepper.

1. Place the beets in a saucepan; cover with cold unsalted water. heat slowly to boiling; reduce the heat. Simmer, uncovered, until barely tender, about 35 minutes. Drain under cold water. Remove the skins and cut the beets into slices, reserve.

2. Melt the butter in a large pan over medium-low heat. Stir in the beets, apple jelly, mint and lemon juice. Cook until warmed through. Add salt and pepper to taste.

The apple jelly is interesting is it not? Very American I think.

The other recipes on the page are for a horseradish cream sauce, including ham and dill, a mustard sauce, with parsley, flour, cream and chicken stock and a ginger sauce. Not being a fan of ginger I'm ignoring this.

He tells us that the Romans loved the leaves and that "it took close to a millennium before some trencherman had the good sense to consume a plateful drenched with butter and jot of lemon juice". And another thing I learnt from this chapter was that if you pick the leaves whilst the beetroot is growing it will encourage it to grow plumper.

So there you have it - not a terribly inspiring post, but I do hope it might make you seek out Bert Greene and his books. I only have two and maybe they are out of print now, but you could probably find them somewhere. Abe Books is a good place to start.

And yet again, isn't it odd, or serendipitous how the same topics keep cropping up.