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Spinach with Cream
Pick the stalks from the spinach; wash well, and boil well in a stewpan with a little salt; boil until very tender; season with nutmeg and two ounces of fresh butter; stir it over a fire until quite warm, then add a gill of cream, two pats of butter and a dessertspoonful of pounded sugar; work the whole over the fire, and dish up the spinach, putting it in the center of dish. Garnish with croutons, and serve.
Sorrel may be treated as spinach, above.
A straightforward creamed spinach in the French manner, though the original assumes you know how much spinach to start with and how hard to squeeze it. The measurements are Victorian and the sugar is not a misprint.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Two pounds of loose spinach cooks down to roughly two cups and serves four as a side; anything less will vanish under the butter and cream.
- A gillFour fluid ounces, half a cup, in American measure; British books of the period reckon a gill at five. "Two pats of butter" is imprecise — a pat was never a fixed quantity, anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon, so reckon on up to an ounce on top of the two ounces already added.
- Pounded sugarGranulated sugar crushed fine in a mortar, the period equivalent of caster sugar. A dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons; it balances the mineral edge of the spinach, though at this quantity the dish will taste faintly sweet.
- Drain hardThe hinge of the recipe. Boiled spinach holds an enormous amount of water; press it firmly in a sieve or wring it in a towel before it meets the butter, or the cream will thin into a green puddle.
- Boil until very tenderWritten for older, coarser spinach with tough stalks. Modern bagged leaf spinach is done in two or three minutes, and stalk-picking is unnecessary unless the bunches are mature.
- ChoppingMany nineteenth-century recipes for creamed spinach chop it or rub it through a sieve after boiling, which is what allows it to be mounded in the centre of the dish. This recipe says nothing either way.
- CroutonsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried in butter, set around the mound rather than scattered over it. They should go on at the last moment or they soften.
- SorrelThe substitution works, but sorrel is far more acid and collapses to a khaki purée in minutes. It needs no boiling water beyond what clings to the washed leaves.
Spinach cooked down, seasoned with nutmeg and enriched with butter, cream and a little sugar is a thoroughly French treatment — épinards à la crème — that English and American household books absorbed through the nineteenth century, and the sweetened version has a longer pedigree still, going back to the medieval and early modern habit of sugaring green vegetables and tarts alike. Fried bread served alongside the purée was a common enough garnish in both professional and domestic cookery. Sorrel appears as the alternative because the two were interchangeable staples of the kitchen garden, and because sorrel, being sharply oxalic, was traditionally thought of as a spring tonic rather than merely a salad leaf. That a general home cookbook could offer this without further explanation says something about how far restaurant French had settled into the middle-class repertoire.