You have to boil all the vegetables the night before – ideally. But this is a step easily forgotten, and the Modern World has graced you with refrigerators, perhaps for these very moments when you wake up Past Ten yet the vinegret must still be ready for serving by six o’clock at a Below Room Temperature. Luckily, you really only require three potatoes, of a Modest, Medium Size, and two carrots of a Respectable Length and Width. The beets, rather, are the most critical bit of the diced amalgamation, the central protagonist of this dish you cling to. That you prepare as part of some sacred ritual you have devised for your own self, a necessary homage to the land that grew the sunflower oil which anoints the vegetables. And the land that grew you. You need just enough of these beets so their essence bleeds into the rest of the produce, rendering it all a deep garnet. 

The potatoes and carrots can be cooked together, in a steel pot filled with enough water to cover the legumes, just so there is no trace sticking out. It’s a sort of a compromise as you attempt to fit everything together in this pot. You break the carrots in half, snapping them with your two hands a bit like you imagine bone might crack, and a chunk inevitably juts out the water despite your best efforts. A bit like you imagine bone might jut out of torn meat – out of soldiers’ skin. Closing your eyes is meant to blacken the images that haunt your idle mind but they only grow sharper. 

Breathe.

You must salt this water (a smidge or so) only when it reaches its breaking point, and add a bay leaf, or two. A mandatory step to coaxing the flavor out of these unearthed goods. You give it twenty minutes, or so, until the gentle bite of a fork’s teeth will tear the potato apart with one smooth pierce. The beets you boil separately. Because the pot, probably, is certainly not large enough to fit the potatoes, and the carrots, and then the Essential Quantity of Beets too. So you use another pot, but you do not need to add the bay leaf. Only salt, and you give it twenty minutes. Or so. 

When it has all been properly stewed, you can catch the potatoes, and the carrots, and the beets. One by one. Fish them out delicately with a big, silver spoon large enough to cradle them as you transfer from seething water to the cool embrace of this Unbreakable Plate that has fed you for years. Then you let them cool. Give it a few hours. Or so. Put them in the fridge to speed up The Process, if you are truly battling time and no one is around to Frown At Your Technique. 

Once the heat has left their flesh, you can begin to carefully dice the potatoes into the meticulously cut cubes you know will be expected. And then the carrots. The beets. One by one. First, you cut lengthwise. Halfways, and then half again until it can no longer be split. Then go perpendicular. Place it all into the belly of the bowl which will hold them. The beets must go on top of the others so their essence can bleed into them, rendering it all a deep garnet. After, you can crank open a can of white beans, assuming that Rusted Instrument decides to cooperate. Rinse them thoroughly to purge them of the preservative they have been stuffed in. The beans, and the sauerkraut. These save you some more time because their form does not need to be forged into meager dice like the potatoes, and the carrots, and the beets. The pickles do though. And you might as well add the whole jar because their bitter acid is imperative to this concoction. A vital contrast to the roots’ starchy sweetness. This recipe would sicken without the brined cucumbers’ juice to push down the nausea.

Then salt and pepper. More than you think, because you never add a sufficient amount. Maybe because you are afraid. Of salt which bakes bread and stings wounds. Then the sunflower oil. Except these days it actually is not from the land that grew you. It has to be sunflower. But now it is from Mexico, and the ritual has become Laced With Sadness. The anointing loses all holiness as you take the spoon and mix each component together – blessing turned curse. So the beets can bleed and render it all a deep garnet. A shade that might make you think of the sangria stains on sunflower fields legions away. The claret tint of plasma leaking out of soldiers’ bodies.

Breathe.

You take the bowl, and place the fruits of your labor in the fridge so it can stay Below Room Temperature. There is at least an hour, or so, until dinner. Until someone says it is Not Salted Enough, even though tears were running as you cut.