Beetroot

A red taproot

Beetroot is the swollen taproot of Beta vulgaris subsp. vulgaris, grouped as the Conditiva Group. It is also called table beet, garden beet or red beet, and there are golden forms. The same subspecies gives sugar beet, Swiss chard and the fodder crop mangelwurzel. Its leaves are eaten too, as beet greens. Most cultivars take 55 to 65 days from germination to a harvestable root, and the slices of many show rings of lighter and darker red.

The colour comes from betanin, a red betalain pigment. Betanin passes through the body unchanged and can briefly colour urine or stools red, which is harmless. Raw beetroot is about 88% water and 10% carbohydrate, and it is a good source of folate. Beets also take up nitrate from the soil.

An old crop and a Polish name

Beta is the old Latin name for the plant. Beets were grown by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, first mainly for their leaves, and by the Roman period probably for their roots as well. Written records go back to Babylonia in the eighth century BC.

In Polish the old word for beet was ćwikła. Gloger notes that Mączyński's dictionary of 1564 has only ćwikła, and that both white and red beets were once called by that name. Botwa, botwina and boćwina, from the Latin beta, became the folk name for the commonest kind of beet. Today ćwikła means a relish of grated beetroot with horseradish.

How beetroot took the name barszcz

Barszcz was first the name of a plant, common hogweed, and of the sour soup made from its fermented leaves. Gloger writes that as boćwina spread, the barszcz cooked from the wild plant went out of use. In Lithuania everyday barszcz was then cooked from beet tops, and in the Crown from the roots alone.

Brückner dates the change of meaning to the eighteenth century, when barszcz came to mean a sour soup of beets and also the rye soup called white barszcz. Łuczaj's review of Polish wild food plants agrees that in the eighteenth century hogweed soup became a rare food of poorer people and beetroot soup took over its name.

Beetroot in fermentation

For barszcz the beets were soured first. Gloger describes a separate wooden vessel for beet kwas in every Polish country house, and in the manors a large oak barrel without a top, covered with linen, in which beets were soured continuously. The kitchen drew kwas for the family, the servants and villagers who came with a pot when their own beets ran out. He also recalls beet kwas mixed with honey as a gargle for a sore throat.

That sour lives on as zakwas z kiszonych buraków, beet leaven, on Poland's list of traditional products. The listing says souring beets before Christmas was especially important, because good Christmas Eve barszcz was unthinkable without it. Elsewhere, pickled beetroot is often made by brine fermentation into tangy, crisp pickles.

Forms of barszcz

Gloger lists the beet barszcz of his time: red with small dumplings and a marrow bone, whitened with smoked meat, clear and meatless for breakfast after a night of dancing or for the midday meal on Christmas Eve, and on fast days with groats and dried mushrooms.

Other uses

Beetroot is eaten boiled, roasted, steamed or raw, and the young leaves go into salads. In Poland and Ukraine it is grated with horseradish into ćwikła. Lithuania has a cold beetroot soup with kefir, šaltibarščiai, and Russia has botvinya, made with beet greens and kvass. Betanin from the roots is used as a red food colouring.

Choosing and storing

Beets can be harvested young for greens or left to form roots. Much commercial beetroot is boiled and sterilised or pickled. For fermentation, the sources on this page do not set a variety, size or salt level. See the beet leaven recipe for a documented method.