Food - Bee Wilson on the double life of beetroot
When you hear the word beetroot, do you think "yum" or do you think "yuk"? Much depends, I suspect, on which circles you move in. Among young Londoners beetroot is in with the in-crowd, it with the It girls. Trendy chefs wood-roast it, mandolin it and crisp it, juice it up with carrots for a California-style cocktail or use it in salads with copious amounts of olive oil. Among Eastern European emigres, it is the basis of traditional soups and side-dishes. For kitchen gardeners, it is a satisfying winter root, which is reaching full maturity just about now. But among us provincials, beetroot is still that odious vegetable that seeps its vinegary juices in pink swirls on cafeteria salad plates.
No vegetable exemplifies better than beetroot the polarity in the modern British diet: between past and present, the working and upper classes, gastrophobes and gastrophiles. (Peas run a close second, though, with the mushy peas/fresh-pea-and-mint divide). The beetroot you can buy in supermarket packets boiled in malt vinegar is more of a condiment than a vegetable - like HP Sauce, it only makes sense with meat. The sort of beetroot dishes esteemed by gourmets, on the other hand, use beets as the main event, almost a meat in itself. What both share, though, is a dazzlingly outlandish pigment.
Some dishes treat beetroot as a dye as much as a flavour: lipstick-coloured tagliatelle, ruby-red risotto, even beetroot-pink icing for a cake. An anonymous cookbook of the 18th century gave a recipe "To make the Crimson Biscuit of red Beet-roots". In French and German, beetroot is actually defined by its redness: bette rouge, rote Rube. This colour, which some loathe and some love, derives from a mixture of pigments, purple betacyanin and yellow betaxanthin. You can get varieties where the purple pigment is lacking, whose flesh is orange, yellow or even white. The two-toned Chioggia beetroot has layers of red and white in a bull's-eye effect and is mild in flavour compared to the large purple kind. The supermarket's vinegary beetroot is not completely mad, in that acidity in the cooking water helps fix the pigment; but only use a little, a tablespoon per litre of water.
The sweet flavour of boiled beetroot makes "a grateful winter sallet" as John Evelyn wrote in 1699. If you have freshly picked ones, then add some of the leafy tops, which resemble Swiss chard. Alice Waters recommends combining them with sherry vinegar, orange zest and tarragon or with white wine vinegar and chives to accompany smoked trout and creme fraIche.
But the best way of eating them is also the most famous: the national dish of Ukraine. Bortsch is a protean soup: it exists with or without cabbage, potato, carrot, mushrooms, beef stock, goose stock, beer, dill and sour cream. Its one fixed point, though, is beetroot.
Bortsch
My mother-in-law makes quite the most delicious bortsch I've ever tasted. Somehow it never comes out so well when I make it, though this is her recipe. Sweat a chopped white onion in 1oz butter. Add 1oz flour and stir well. Then add two medium-large or four small cooked and peeled beetroots, grated. (Either bake or boil them yourself or buy ready-cooked.) Still stirring, pour one tin of Campbell's consomme made up with water (or fresh beef stock, if you have any illegal bones). Allow to come to the boil and simmer for five minutes. Process in a processor but not until completely smooth. Stir in most of a carton of sour cream and check seasoning (pepper? Salt? Tabasco?) and consistency (more water? Stock?). Serve hot or cold with more sour cream. Do not spill any, unless you like tie-dyed trousers.
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