Spinach Salad
Pick over and wash in several waters or until no sand is left in bottom of bowl, one-half peck spinach. Drain and cook in its own juice and the water that clings to the leaves (if spinach is old, cook it in plenty of water), until soft. Drain dry as possible and chop finely. Season with salt, pepper and Tarragon vinegar. Cut bacon in shreds crosswise, then cut shreds in small bits. Sauté them until delicately browned and crisp, skim them from the fat, add them to spinach, add one tablespoon of bacon fat. Butter lightly small Dairole molds and pack solidly with spinach. Chill, unmold and arrange on thin slices of cold, boiled ham, tongue or Bologna sausage, trimmed in circular pieces a trifle larger than mold of spinach. Arrange each portion in a nest of parsley or cress, and fill depression on top of spinach with Mayonnaise or Sauce Tartare (for recipe see Page 84).
A molded spinach salad of the sort that filled the cold-entrée slot on Edwardian menus. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities and the molds need translating.
- Half a peck of spinachA peck is eight dry quarts, so this is four quarts of loosely packed leaves — roughly 2 to 3 lb as sold today, cooking down to a couple of cups chopped. Spinach bought by measure rather than weight varied with how it was heaped, so treat this as an approximation.
- Dairole moldsThe book means dariole molds: small deep tins, cylindrical and slightly tapered, of roughly 2 to 3 fl oz — much the shape of a popover cup or a large ramekin. Any small mold of about that capacity works, and a muffin tin will do if the cups are buttered well.
- Wring it dryThis is the hinge. Spinach packed damp will weep in the mold and collapse when unmolded. After chopping, twist it in a clean towel and squeeze hard — you want it barely moist before the seasoning and bacon go in.
- Cooking time"Until soft" made sense when spinach came in tough mature bunches. Modern bagged leaves wilt in two or three minutes in the water clinging to them; longer only turns them gray-green and bitter.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth seeking out — it carries the whole dish. White wine vinegar with a bruised tarragon sprig left in it overnight is a fair substitute. Add it sparingly and taste, as the bacon brings its own salt.
- The baconCut across the strips into small dice, as written, and render slowly so the bits crisp rather than scorch. Reserve the tablespoon of fat and stir it in while the spinach is still just warm so it coats rather than sets in lumps.
- The base slicesCold boiled ham, tongue and bologna were all deli staples; any thinly sliced cooked ham works. Cut the rounds slightly wider than the mold so a rim of meat shows.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; expect roughly half a dozen molds, depending on their size. They can be chilled some hours ahead; unmold and dress with the mayonnaise or Sauce Tartare only just before serving, or the sauce slumps.
Molded vegetable salads like this one belong to the period when American Sunday dinner still followed a loosely French service, and a cold entrée was expected between the soup and the roast. The dariole mold that gives the dish its shape came straight out of the professional pastry kitchen, and its appearance in a domestic cookbook is a fair measure of how much restaurant technique had filtered into middle-class households. The flavoring, though, is not French: chopped spinach dressed with bacon, its fat and a sharp vinegar is a long-standing Central European treatment, common in German-American cooking of the same decades. Spring is the right season for it — spinach is a cool-season crop that bolts in summer heat, so cookbooks of this era tended to place it among the spring dinners.