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Spinach
Spinach requires good washing and close picking. Boil with little salt; let it boil about twenty minutes; drain, season with butter, pepper and salt; garnish the dish with slices of hard-boiled eggs. Spinach is very nice covered with nicely poached eggs.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment that needs only one real correction: the cooking time. Everything else holds up.
- Twenty minutes is far too longSpinach leaves collapse in two to three minutes in a covered pan with just the water clinging to them, or one minute in boiling water. Twenty minutes gives you olive-grey pulp with most of the flavour and vitamin C in the pot. Cook until the leaves have just slumped and turned deep green, then stop.
- "Close picking"This means pulling off the coarse stems and the thick central ribs of mature leaves, and discarding anything yellowed. Bagged baby spinach needs none of this; bunched spinach with stems the width of a pencil still does.
- WashingField spinach carries fine grit that sticks in the crumpled leaf. Fill a bowl or sink with cold water, submerge and swish the leaves, lift them out rather than pouring, and repeat until no sand settles at the bottom. Two or three changes is normal.
- Drain hardThe hinge of the dish. Spinach holds an enormous amount of water and will thin the butter into a puddle. Tip it into a colander, press with the back of a spoon or gather it in a clean towel and squeeze, then return it to the dry pan with the butter.
- Salt in the water"Little salt" is right; spinach is naturally saline-tasting and takes salt readily. Season again after draining, once you know how much water has gone.
- YieldA pound of raw spinach cooks down to roughly a cup and serves two, sometimes three as a side. Buy far more than looks reasonable.
- The poached-egg versionSpinach under poached eggs is the basis of what later menus call eggs Florentine, though that name usually implies a cheese sauce as well. Poach the eggs while the spinach drains so both are hot at once, and keep the eggs soft-yolked so they sauce the leaves.
Spinach reached European kitchens from Persia by way of the Arab Mediterranean and was well established in England by the sixteenth century, valued partly because it grows fast and comes early in the season. Its long association with butter and hard-boiled or poached eggs is old and practical: the vegetable is lean and slightly acidic, and fat and egg yolk round it out. The pairing became formalised in nineteenth-century French cookery as anything "à la florentine" — a bed of spinach, generally traced to the Italian court cooks credited with popularising the vegetable in France, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The long boiling times given in books of this period are often said to reflect kitchens where vegetables might be held on the stove until the meat was ready, and where a soft, thoroughly cooked vegetable was taken to be the expected result rather than a fault — though how far this describes general practice is hard to establish.