Cream of Spinach
½ peck spinach. 6 cups cold water. ½ small bay leaf. 1½ teaspoons salt. 3 tablespoons Cottolene. 2 cups milk. 2 slices onion. 3 tablespoons flour. 1/2 cup heavy cream.
Cayenne pepper and celery salt.
PROCESS: Cook spinach in water thirty minutes. Drain, chop, and rub through sieve. Scald milk with onion and bay leaf. Melt Cottolene in sauce-pan, add flour, stir to a smooth paste, pour on slowly scalded milk (first removing onion and bay leaf), stirring constantly. Add seasonings, spinach pulp; cook five minutes and serve with cream, whipped stiff. Sprinkle each portion with finely chopped parsley.
A standard cream soup of the period, built on a milk-and-flour velouté infused with onion and bay. Two things date it: the shortening and the half-hour boil.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, gone from shelves for decades. Use butter, tablespoon for tablespoon, for a better-tasting roux.
- A peck of spinachA peck is a dry measure of 8 quarts, but leaf spinach packs so loosely that the weight varies wildly — figure roughly 2 to 3 lb of untrimmed fresh spinach for the 1½ pecks called for. Buy by weight, not volume.
- Thirty minutes is far too longModern spinach wilts in two or three minutes and turns olive-drab and sulphurous well before half an hour. Cook it just until collapsed, then drain and purée; the colour and the flavour both depend on it.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a sieve was the usual way to get a smooth pulp in 1913. A blender does it in seconds, though passing the puree through a fine strainer afterwards still catches the stringy stalk fibre.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk with the onion and bay just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edges, around 180F, then let it stand off the heat to infuse before straining. Boiling it hard gives a skin and a cooked-milk taste.
- The salt is a typo"1/2 teaspoons salt" is either half a teaspoon or an error for 1 1/2 teaspoons, matching the other one-and-a-half measures in the list. Season to taste at the end, after the cream goes on.
- Cayenne and celery saltNo quantities are given. A pinch of cayenne and a quarter teaspoon of celery salt suit this volume; celery salt also adds sodium, so salt after adding it.
- The whipped creamThe half cup of heavy cream is not stirred in — it is whipped stiff and spooned onto each bowl, where it melts into the hot soup. Whip it unsweetened and unsalted.
- YieldRoughly two quarts, serving six to eight as a first course.
52 Sunday Dinners was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published in 1913, and it is a cookbook with a sponsor: Cottolene appears in nearly every recipe because the book was issued in the interest of the N. K. Fairbank Company, which made that cottonseed-oil shortening. Cottonseed oil was one of the first industrially refined fats sold to American home cooks, marketed through the 1890s and 1900s as a cleaner, cheaper substitute for lard, and promotional cookbooks like this one were the usual vehicle. The soup itself is pure Boston Cooking School method — a white sauce thickened with a roux made, as the book requires throughout, with Cottolene and flour, flavoured by scalding the milk with onion and bay, then loosened with a vegetable purée. Fannie Farmer's contemporaries built cream of celery, cream of asparagus and cream of pea on exactly the same frame, and the whipped cream garnish is floated rather than stirred in.