Beet/Beetroot Salad

Beets/beetroot are a wintertime vegetable in Iraq, and they come in very handy when tomatoes are scarce in that season. There is evidence that red beetroots existed in the ancient Mesopotamian region. In Akkadian, they were called ‘shumundar’ (Thompson, A Dictionary of Assyrian Botany). Besides, one of the Babylonian stew recipes is cooked with beets. However, beets are nowhere to be found in the extant medieval cookbooks, although references to jughandar and jukandar d