A friend has told me about something his Eastern European grandmother used to make called beet jam.
By the way, "Alice's Restaurant Cookbook," by Alice May Brock, apparently had a recipe for beet jam, and Arlo Guthrie sang about it.
But I have to say, beet jam sounds like it is preserved using sugar, and that's a problem when it comes to shelf storage.
Her fiction offers a warm portrait of Estonian rural life: a world of pancakes, sugar beet soup and jam-making.
Front row, left to right: Tiny ears of "un-sprayed" corn, beets, sweet cherry jam, zucchini, sweet onion, patty pan squash, tomatoes, variegated eggplant, leeks, yellow beans, cherry peppers and bi-color corn.
Additional foods include apple jelly and raspberry jam, wildflower honey, pickled beets, herb-infused vinegars, spicy mustard, granola, and various herb mixtures (from $3.50 to $10).
They include chunky pickled beets; licorice-pickled onions; tomato-chili jam to perk up a turkey sandwich; sweet and sour Auntie Anna's Green Pepper Relish, which is good with pork; and smoked paprika oil to drizzle on steamed halibut.
Excellent peppery noisettes of venison came on a lightly sweet-tart sauce made from unsugared grape jam and were accompanied by beets, pearl onions and the unusual, sweet-tart physalis peruviana, also known as cape gooseberry.
Delicately browned Stonington scallops, stippled with cubes of bacon, English peas and horseradish honey; duck rillette accompanied by sour cherry jam, pickled onion and crostini; pickled beet salad, coupled with goat's milk feta, young lettuce and toasted pumpkin seeds in an orange vinaigrette — all were super.
WHAT WE LIKED Farm Egg in Purgatory (special), shrimp with toasted garlic and Marsala, skirt steak with pico salsa, octopus al la plancha, mushrooms with poached egg and smoked paprika (special), grilled halloumi cheese with fig jam (special), cherry-tomato salad (special), beet salad, NoMa wood-fired pizza, burger with blue cheese and bacon, tortoni cream cake, caramel flan.
You can freeze the jam, of course, or pressure-can the beet and sugar concoction, no problem.
