Harvard Beets

Jerri’s Aunt Lydia thought that she was complimenting her young nephews when she told their mother, “Oh, Esther, you are so lucky! Your boys eat everything.”

Jerri’s mother was not very appreciative of the comment. Years later she told her daughter, “Luck had nothing to do with it! We taught them to eat their food.”

She also taught her husband to eat his food. Jerri recalls a conversation her mother told her about that went something like this:

Knip (Jerri’s Dad): “I don’t like peas.”

Esther (her Mom): “Well, you’re going to eat them anyway. We have to set good examples for the boys.”

And so they all ate peas. My mother-in-law could be pretty firm. When it came to food, she was even firm with herself. I can’t remember a single time she refused to at least try a dish offered to her. She would take a serving spoonful and eat it. If she liked it, she would take a second serving. If not she would say, “It’s not my favorite.”

Jerri and her brothers learned to do the same.

Researchers have demonstrated that the food pregnant women or nursing mothers eat influences how their children respond to various foods. Mothers who eat a well-balanced diet of vegetables, fruits and cereal grains are more likely to have children who will have the same healthy diet preferences.

But as many other studies have shown, parents and other caregivers have a powerful influence on the eating habits of children. We teach by example. Jerri’s mother did not drink alcohol, cook with alcohol or have any in her home, except for vanilla and some other flavor extracts. No beef bourguignon or beer-battered fish came from her kitchen.

Jerri’s father would never have dared to bring a beer home, but he once told me that he enjoyed a cold beer after a hard day’s work with the crew combining wheat or haying. Boys being boys, her brothers may well have sneaked a peek of the men enjoying a refreshing bottle behind the barn before washing up for dinner. With such an example, what farm boy would not begin wondering what was so good about that stuff in the brown bottles? Maybe this explains why Jerri’s oldest brother developed an appreciation of Foster’s beer.

Leading by example is the way to help people enjoy different foods. Many if not most of us have heard the dreaded phrase, “Eat your vegetables,” or even worse, “You’re not the table until you finish your Brussels sprouts.” Or beets.

Beets show up fairly regularly on lists of least favorite foods. I take that to mean that a lot of parents have been failing in their duty to help their children develop healthy eating habits, because beets are one of the “superfoods.” They contain lots of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and just enough sugar to make them a good source of energy.

Recently I learned that beets have been used as an aphrodisiac since Roman times and are now known to contain boron, which is necessary for the production of human sex hormones. If my father had told me that eating beets would improve my (nonexistent) thirteen-year-old sex life, I would have asked Mom to serve them every day.

Actually, I have liked beets since I was a child. Like most root vegetables, they grow well in cool climates, so we grew and ate them often. We not only had them at home, but school lunches occasionally featured beets. And most kids ate them. If we didn’t teachers gave us notes to take home so Mom and Dad could have a talk with us. When the horrible canned spinach was being dished out, I was told to ask “for just a little bit.” School cooks didn’t want food to go to waste, so they usually honored such requests.

Harvard beets were pretty popular when I was growing up. No one knows for sure where the name came from, but it sounds elegant, and the sweet and sour sauce complements the vegetable perfectly. Though they do color potatoes a rather unpleasant pink, Harvard beets are a welcome addition to dining tables from the formal dining rooms of New England to the farm kitchens of Kansas and Wisconsin.

This recipe is adapted from The Mennonite Community Cookbook.

INGREDIENTS:

3 cups cooked diced beets
1/2 cup sugar
1 T cornstarch
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup water
2 whole cloves
2 T butter

PROCEDURE:

Start by preparing the beets. Scrub the beets and cut the stems about two inches above the beets. Save the good leaves. If you are not going to use them right away, freeze them to use in borscht or as a green vegetable.

Heat a large pot of water to boiling. Put the beets into the boiling water and cook them until they are fork tender. The time needed will depend on the size of the beets, but plan on boiling them for thirty minutes or even more. When the beets are nearly done, fill a large bowl or pan with ice water.

Using a slotted spoon, put the beets into the cold water. When the beets are cool enough to handle, slip the skins off. You can use a knife to help or use just your fingers. Trim the stems and roots off the beets and chop them into a half-inch dice.

Mix the sugar, salt and cornstarch together in a two quart saucepan. Stir in the vinegar and water. Add the two cloves and put the pan over moderate heat. Keep stirring to make a smooth sauce and cook it for about five minutes.

Stir the beets into the hot sauce, remove the pan from the heat, cover it and let it stand for at least a half hour. When you are ready to serve the beets, bring the pan back to a boil, remove from the heat and stir in two tablespoons of butter. Harvard beets can be served at room temperature, but they are best served warm.

NOTES: Instead of chopping the beets, you can cut them into eighth-inch slices. If you don’t have any whole cloves in your cabinet, you can use a dash of ground cloves or you can omit the cloves entirely.

Oven-barbecued Country Ribs

Sometime in the late 1950’s our family acquired its first charcoal grill. Before then we had cooked over open fires, mostly on the shores of lakes near Hayward. The meat was skin-on wieners from one of the local butcher shops or grocery stores and dessert was marshmallows toasted over the coals. Cooking utensils were a can opener and sticks of hazel brush for roasting the wieners and marshmallows and stirring the can of beans.

If we didn’t forget them, there would be spoons for serving Mom’s potato salad and eating the beans and salad from paper plates. Over the years I learned that you could open a can with a jack knife, carve sticks into substitute spoons and eat off birch bark plates. I also learned the truly valuable skill of how to build a fire, even if it had rained just a few minutes before we got to our picnic place.

Later I learned to toast sandwiches over an open fire when I began going deer hunting and ice fishing with my father. By that time I had my own jack knife and the patience to find the perfect stick with two twigs branching off the central stem to make a toasting tool. Besides learning to read a fire properly so my sandwich did not turn black or get too smoky, I also learned how close I could put my wet gloves to the fire without setting them ablaze.

Thus, when we got our first charcoal grill, I became the outdoor chef. The grill was a shallow flat tray on a tripod base. There was no cover; the kettle grill was not yet on the market. But ours worked just fine and in addition to wieners, we were soon enjoying hamburgers, bratwursts, chicken legs and pork ribs from the grill.

One year I even tried to grill some meat from a bear we had shot. My mother had given up trying to cook it. She explained, “It’s just too fat. When I fry steaks, they’re floating in fat. I tried making a roast, and the pan was half full of grease. Even Dad said it was too fat for him.”

I had what seemed like a logical suggestion. “Pick out a nice roast. We’ll cut it into two-inch cubes, and I’ll grill them for dinner. The fat will drip out and the meat should be delicious. We can brush on some barbecue sauce when it’s close to done.”

The incident is stamped indelibly in my memory. It was a cold New Year’s Day. I set the grill up on the front porch. I carefully arranged a big pile of charcoal briquets in the grill, lit them and waited until the coals were an even gray. Heaven help me, but I think I may have wiped the grate with some lard or bacon grease before I put the chunks of meat on the fire.

Everything looked promising for the first three or four minutes. When I turned the meat, the bottom sides looked perfect. A couple of coals flared up as fat dripped off the meat, but as this often happened I was ready to sprinkle a few drops of water on the hot spot. However, more flare-ups occurred and rapidly grew into a conflagration. The remaining water seemed to fan the flames when I tossed it on the grill. Have you ever seen four pounds of flaming bear meat sending black smoke into the sky?

My father came out the door and told me that we had to put the fire out. “If we don’t do something quick, someone will call the fire department and we’ll have a fine for a false alarm. If it is a false alarm,” he added, looking at the flames rising above the eaves on the porch.

My mother rescued us. She came out with her big tea kettle and bravely doused the flames.

I don’t remember what we had for dinner that day, but I do remember that we gave the bear meat to Uncle Ruel and his family. He said that it was some of the best bear meat he had ever tasted.

Today I don’t do much grilling outside in the winter. Maybe it’s just that I don’t like standing out in the cold while the meat cooks, but it might be that I have learned how to make tasty country back ribs in the comfort of the kitchen. Once you put them in the oven, they cook for at least two hours, so you have plenty of time to read a book, watch TV or even take a nap if you have a good timer to wake you after an hour or so to check that the liquid in the pan has not boiled away.

INGREDIENTS:

Non-stick cooking spray or vegetable oil
2 – 3 lbs. country pork ribs
1/4 cup water or wine
1 T liquid smoke seasoning
1/4 – 1/3 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. thyme
1/4 tsp. basil
1/4 tsp. rosemary
1/8 tsp. garlic powder
1/8 tsp. cayenne powder
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
About 3/4 cup barbecue sauce

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 325º and grease a nine by thirteen-inch covered baking pan or casserole.

If necessary cut the ribs into serving-size pieces and place them in a single layer in the pan. Pour a quarter cup of water around the meat and add a tablespoon of liquid smoke seasoning. If you have a mortar and pestle, grind the salt and spices together or just stir them together in cup and sprinkle the mixture evenly over the meat. Dribble your preferred barbecue sauce over and around the meat. I use from two-thirds to three-fourth cup of sauce, depending on how much meat is in the pan.

Cover the pan and put it on a center shelf in the oven. After an hour, check to make sure that there is still adequate liquid in the pan. Add a little water or wine if necessary. Check the pan every thirty minutes or so after the first hour.

Serve with more barbecue sauce and your choice of bread, potatoes and salad.

NOTES: Feel free to adjust the seasonings, but start with at least a teaspoon of liquid smoke seasoning. Make sure your oven is at or slightly below 325º when you start cooking the ribs. If you worry about the pan going dry, feel free to check the amount of liquid after forty-five minutes or so. You don’t want to boil the meat, so be careful not to add too much water.