Boil the spinach in salted water until tender; drain and chop fine. Fry 1 chopped onion in 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; add the chopped spinach, a pinch of pepper and curry-powder. Cover and let simmer five minutes. Serve on a platter with stewed prawns and garnish with croutons.
A brief entry that assumes the cook knows the rest. Two decisions matter: how you cook the spinach, and how much curry powder "a pinch" ought to be.
- QuantityThe original gives no weight. Two pounds of fresh mature spinach, or three 10-oz bags of the young leaf, cooks down to enough for four as a side dish. Frozen chopped spinach works here since the leaves are chopped fine anyway — thaw 20 oz and squeeze it dry rather than boiling it.
- Don't over-boilMature spinach needs two to three minutes in salted water, young leaf barely one. Boiling greens past tender until limp costs the colour and most of the flavour. Drain in a colander and press hard with the back of a spoon; wet spinach will dilute the butter and onion into a puddle.
- The curry powderA pinch is under-seasoned for two pounds of spinach. Start with a teaspoon and taste. More importantly, add it to the frying onion and let it cook 30 seconds in the hot butter before the spinach goes in — raw curry powder stirred into wet greens tastes dusty and flat.
- The onionTwo tablespoons of butter over medium heat, and give the onion a full eight to ten minutes until soft and just golden. The recipe's five-minute covered simmer at the end is only for marrying the flavours, not for cooking anything.
- Prawns"Stewed prawns" meant a separate dish on the same platter. Shell-on or peeled raw prawns need two to three minutes in simmering liquid and no more; the pre-cooked pink ones sold today only need warming through. Anything longer and they tighten to erasers.
- CroutonsPeriod croutons were bread cut in triangles or dice and fried in butter or clarified fat, not oven-dried cubes. Fry them just before serving so they stay crisp against the wet spinach.
- ServingServes four as a vegetable course, or two as a light supper with the prawns and rice.
This is less a dish from Bombay than a dish from the British in India — spinach with fried onion and a spoonful of commercial curry powder is the Anglo-Indian shorthand for saag that filled British cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The pre-blended tinned powder was a British commercial product, a fixed blend sold so that a cook at home need not grind spices to order the way an Indian kitchen would. Collections billed as dishes "of all nations" leaned heavily on such things: a familiar vegetable, a recognisably foreign seasoning, and a place name to make the day's entry sound like travel. The pairing with prawns is genuine enough in spirit — prawns are abundant in Indian coastal cooking — though the croutons are pure European garnish.