Beetroot Salad with Sour Cream Dressing – Easy Recipe

We make beetroot salad a lot. When I was at school, at the start of every summer we were sent off to summer camps to get a taste of rest and work. Usually the work was simple — picking young vegetables. Carrots, cabbage, beetroot. Sometimes strawberries, but rarely. I remember one moment: we were being driven in a rickety old bus, and the foreman was explaining to our supervisor that we would be picking “beta”. Beta? What beta??? It turns out that Beta is the Latin name of a herbaceous plant of the amaranth family — the beetroot everyone knows.

Originally from Asia, this root vegetable is one of the oldest cultivated plants. Interestingly, at first only the tops were eaten, while the root (the fleshy part) was used as medicine. Beetroot reached our lands relatively recently — only some 10 centuries ago. You can still hear its old name, Sviatoslav's vegetable. The chronicles first mention beetroot in the Izbornik of Sviatoslav, the miscellany compiled in Kyivan Rus', hence the name.

Today beetroot is grown everywhere, and quite successfully. Some varieties can grow even in harsh climates. Along with the familiar “red” varieties, there are industrial ones grown for livestock feed or sugar production. I remember from childhood that my grandmother's huge vegetable garden (I shudder just thinking of it) had, besides the beds of cucumbers and tomatoes, a big plot of beetroot. And scattered all over the garden, among the thickets of potatoes, grew enormous sugar beets. By autumn we'd end up with two tonnes of them, or more. The cows and pigs were happy all winter. One catch: we had to buy varietal seeds every year, because beetroot cross-pollinates readily, and the result was a hybrid that was not deep red-black but pale pink and striped.

As for red beetroot, we cooked it in all sorts of ways. First and foremost — herring under a fur coat salad. It's the pinnacle of our home cooking. Layered salads like herring under a fur coat or Mimosa salad are a bit of a mystery to foreigners, which is a pity.

Beetroot, originally from Asia, is one of the oldest cultivated plants.

One of our favourite home recipes is the salad beetroot with prunes. We add walnuts to it and sometimes a little grated cheese — just a little. But I'm not keen on this recipe because of the dressing. I'm no fan of mayonnaise, especially shop-bought. Although, if there's no way around it, you can make homemade mayonnaise. But experience shows you can always come up with a suitable sauce that isn't fat-based.

Here is a simple recipe — homemade beetroot salad. Not just simple, but really simple.