Beet

Introduced to Vietnam by the French as salade russe, this salad is a fine example of how Viet cooking blurs culinary and cultural traditions. Home cooks incorporated it into their repertoire, and I grew up treating it as any other Viet vegetable dish. During the summer, my mother served it with roasted chicken that had been marinated in garlic and Maggi Seasoning sauce. While there are many versions of this salad, I prefer combining the three root vegetables with chopped egg and a creamy herb vinaigrette. Use red beets for a beautiful magenta salad, pink or golden beets for a jewel-toned salad. For an interesting barbecue menu, serve the salad with Grilled Lemongrass Pork Riblets (page 145), Grilled Corn with Scallion Oil (page 183), and a lightly dressed green salad.

Tangy goat cheese and sweet beets are a famously good pairing; it is with good reason that so many French brasseries and bistros have a salad featuring the two on their menus. Lentils are another ingredient favored in France, and the combination of the three makes for one very satisfying salad. (Crispy bits of smoky bacon don’t hurt either.) I don’t recommend cheating with canned lentils. The texture and flavor of dried lentils cooked in a well-seasoned stock is far superior, and they cook up in no time.

This elegant appetizer or starter salad for a dinner party celebrates two loves: goat cheese and roasted beets. It takes more time than a simple tossed salad, but all can be done in advance for entertaining. Mixing red beets with golden and candy-striped varieties makes an especially gorgeous presentation. The CKC chèvre that I use is from Chrissy Omo, a local cheesemaking prodigy. (For more about Chrissy, see opposite page.) Although I highly recommend it, CKC cheese is hard to get outside of the Austin–Hill Country area. Support your local cheesemaker by checking out neighborhood farmers’ markets.

The chicken is in the oven—heat forming a golden crust that seals in the juices, salt working its silent alchemy within, denaturing some of the proteins in tough muscles making those parts more tender and flavorful. Roasting is the easiest way to cook chicken and the tastiest. All that is required to reach perfection is time and the perfect salt. Sugpo Asin, a king among salts, glowing rose-cloud white, lush and firmly crunchy, with dulcet brine notes that play lavishly (but with discipline) against the sweet tamed gaminess of poultry, honors this basic meat and vegetable meal as all basic meals should be honored—asserting the preeminence of simple home cooking as the cornerstone of eating well.

There is something uplifting about refreshing food eaten on a frosty day. What follows is a light, fresh-tasting salad that makes your eyes sparkle.

Young carrots, no thicker than a finger and often not much longer, appear in the shops in late spring, their bushy leaves intact. Often, they have a just-picked air about them, their tiny side roots, as fine as hair, still fresh and crisp. At this stage they lack the fiber needed to grate well, and boiling does them few favors. They roast sweetly, especially when tucked under the roast. The savory meat juices form a glossy coat that turns the carrot into a delectable little morsel. I have used a leg of lamb here but in fact any cut would work—a shoulder or loin, for instance. The spice rub also works for chicken.

I have lost count of the number of appreciative emails and blog mentions about the brownies and the chocolate almond cake in The Kitchen Diaries. They are received gratefully. It is true that I am rarely happier than when making chocolate cake. I especially like baking those that manage to be cakelike on the outside and almost molten within. Keeping a cake’s heart on the verge of oozing is down partly to timing and partly to the ingredients—ground almonds and very good-quality chocolate will help enormously. But there are other ways to moisten a cake, such as introducing grated carrots or, in this case, crushed beets. The beets are subtle here, some might say elusive, but using them is a lot cheaper than ground almonds, and they blend perfectly with dark chocolate. This is a seductive cake, deeply moist and tempting. The serving suggestion of crème fraîche is not just a nod to the sour cream so close to beets’ Eastern European heart, it is an important part of the cake.

In the 1980s, puréed beets, snipped chives, and swirls of sour cream made a startling chilled soup that became an almost permanent fixture at the café in which I cooked for much of the decade. The most outrageous Schiaparelli pink, it was a picture in its deep white-porcelain tureen. I wish now I had had the nerve to include the finely chopped gherkins whose sweet-sour pickle notes could have lifted the soup from its candy-cane sweetness. One glance at a Russian or Swedish cookbook would have been enough.

The chickpea possesses a dry, earthy quality and a knobbly texture that I find endlessly useful and pleasing to eat. No other member of the legume family has quite the same mealy, warm nuttiness. This is the bean I want bubbling on the stove when there is pouring rain outside, filling the kitchen with its curiously homey steam as it slowly simmers its way to tenderness. Unlike its more svelte cousins, the flageolet and the cannellini, the chickpea is almost impossible to overcook. The length of time it takes to soften rules it out of weekday cooking for me, so I sometimes resort to opening a can. Chickpeas, often labeled ceci or garbanzo, leave their can relatively unharmed, which is more than you can say for a flageolet. They make good patties that you can season with cumin, chile, garlic, sesame, or coriander and fry until lightly crisp on the outside. Chickpea patties need a little texture if they are to be of interest. I process them only so far, leaving them with a texture that is partly as smooth as hummus with, here and there, a little crunchiness. The patty mixture needs a good ten minutes to rest before cooking. To calm the garlic notes, I spoon over a sauce of yogurt, grated cucumber, and mint or a similar one of shredded beets, taking care not to overmix it to a lurid pink.

A good contrast here between the sweetly warm beets, nutty hemp, and tangy goat cheese. Any crisp, slightly bitter salad leaf will work. The English-grown ivory and crimson chicory, crunchy, juicy, and appealing to the eye, works well but the classic white would be just as welcome.

Late spring, 2007. Six small beets, round as golf balls and not much bigger, arrive in a thick brown paper bag, its edges sewn together with string. The air of moist Riverford soil and sweet roots wafts up as the bag is torn open, but the day is leaden with damp and cold and I have rarely felt less like eating a beet salad. Supper is going to be meatballs: fat, crumbly patties of ground lamb with garlic, dill, and parsley. It crosses my mind that a handful of grated beets might sweeten the ground meat and lighten the texture. What we end up eating on the coldest spring day for years is plump rounds of sweet and spicy meat, crunchy with cracked wheat and crimson with the vivid flesh of finely grated beets. The inclusion of the roots has broken up the solid lump of ground meat and married well with the garlic and clean-tasting herbs. We dip the sizzling patties into a slush of shredded cucumber, yogurt, and mint, given a snap of piquancy (to balance the beets) with a spoonful of capers.

A pickle can be a symphony of flavors. Be creative with pickling spices—try throwing in the whole kitchen sink if you like. Experiment with different accents: cumin seeds and coriander for an Indian pickle; caraway, celery, and mustard seeds to evoke Eastern European flavors; ginger, garlic, bruised lemongrass, and a shot of soy for a taste of Southeast Asia. For a crisp pickle start with crisp fruits and vegetables; those that are just shy of ripe work well.

Barley replaces the traditional Arborio rice here for a textured, nutty-tasting whole-grain risotto. Soaking the barley overnight reduces its cooking time. Gold beets have a sweet, mellow flavor. When roasted with the skin intact, their beautiful color is preserved. Wait to salt the risotto until you’ve added the ricotta salata; as the name implies, it is quite salty. This aged ricotta does not melt, but instead retains a pleasant firm chewiness.

Fesenjan combines fruit and meat, a Persian cooking style that traveled to Europe in the Middle Ages. This version gets its deep ruby color from the addition of beets (shown opposite). Served with rice, this stew makes for a sumptuous feast. Instead of chicken, try using duck or tempeh. Look for pomegranate syrup at natural and Middle Eastern food stores. If you can’t find pomegranate syrup, substitute 2 1/2 cups of unsweetened pomegranate juice and leave out the stock.

Luscious persimmon fruits blow in and out of markets in late fall. They grow wild in North America—I’ve found them while foraging in Maryland—but the native species is small and astringent. The two kinds found in stores are cultivars from Asia. Hachiyas are oval-shaped and must be completely soft, all the way down to the base, before being eaten. Fuyus, which look like flat tomatoes, are eaten firm. If you can wait until it ripens, the Hachiya has more flavor, but the Fuyu works just as well in this recipe.

These beets are roasted, and very delicious! But if you have a mandoline, a professional tool that will slice vegetables evenly and very thinly, skip the roasting process and slice the beets raw (this works only with beets at the peak of seasonal freshness—sweet, dry, and tender). When really fresh beets are sliced so thin as to be almost shaved, there is no need to cook them. Toasted walnut oil adds a classic French flavor to the salad, but you could also use almond or pecan oil, available online and at gourmet or specialty markets. Store nut oils in the refrigerator; they turn rancid fairly quickly.

We bought my grandmother a food processor, but she continued to use her hand-cranked shredder for grating. Made of cast aluminum, it was a sturdy beast that attached to the counter with a vise. She would peel the carrots and Dede would patiently shred them into a large bowl for carrot slaw. This recipe is a bit more complex in flavor and technique than Meme’s, and I use a food processor to shred the vegetables. Just make sure you shred the carrots first! To prevent the beets from staining the carrots when mixed in the salad, the key is to dress the beets before combining with the carrots. This seals in their red pigments (betalains), which don’t dissolve in oil.

Beets are a highly underused vegetable in the United States. In Europe you can buy whole cooked beets in any grocery store, but since here you have to buy them raw and cook them, I opt for canned beets to make this simple salad.

One of my favorite gatherings is the Food as Medicine conference, which brings together hundreds of nutritionally minded physicians, nurses, and other wellness professionals. I cook for the attendees, and while they often kindly tell me how much they learn from me, it definitely goes both ways. In fact, this recipe was inspired by Dr. Joel Evans, who is attracted to nutrition from both a scientific and an aesthetic viewpoint and loves to speak about the colors of food having a tangible relation to their healing qualities. There is a school of thought—and increasing scientific evidence—that the more vibrant the color, the more nutrition there is to be found in a food. As an ode to Joel, I set out to create the most colorful salad I could, using purple beets, orange carrots, and fresh mint. If I’d had a vegetable crisper instead of a box of crayons as a kid, this salad would have been the result. You can substitute lemon or lime juice for the orange juice.

Though beet borscht is generally eaten cold, the addition of potatoes creates a more robust version for fall or winter. Onion-Rye Scones (page 155) complement this soup well. Unless you are fond of hand grating, using a food processor makes the job much easier.