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Spinach with Deviled Eggs
1 peck spinach. ¼ pound bacon.
Salt, pepper. 1/3 cup butter.
Few grains nutmeg. 5 hard-cooked eggs. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/4 teaspoon pepper. 1/2 teaspoon finely chopped parsley. 1/2 teaspoon grated onion. 1/2 cup minced ham.
Cream Salad Dressing.
PROCESS: Cook spinach in the usual way. Cook the bacon with spinach to give it flavor. When spinach is tender, remove bacon, drain spinach and chop fine. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Add butter, mix well and pack into an oval mold. Keep hot over hot water, cut eggs in halves lengthwise, remove yolks and rub through a sieve. Add ham, salt, pepper, parsley and onion juice. Moisten with Cream Salad Dressing to bind mixture together. Refill halves of eggs with this mixture, heaping it pyramid-like. Turn mold of spinach on hot serving dish and surround with stuffed eggs.
A spring vegetable centerpiece built on two techniques that have fallen out of use: a molded vegetable purée and a boiled "cream" salad dressing. Neither is difficult, but both need translating.
- A peck of spinachA peck is a dry measure of eight quarts, not a weight, and loose spinach leaves fill it very unevenly. Reckon on roughly 2 lb of untrimmed spinach, which cooks down to about 2 cups chopped — enough to fill a small oval mold.
- "14 pound bacon"A printer's slip for 1/4 pound. Four ounces of slab or thick-cut bacon simmered with the greens is the intent; it is removed before the spinach is chopped and does not appear in the finished dish.
- Cook spinach in the usual wayPeriod practice generally meant boiling in a quantity of salted water, often far longer than we would now. Two to three minutes in the water clinging to the washed leaves gives better color and flavor; press it hard in a sieve before chopping, or the mold will weep onto the platter.
- Grated onion, onion juiceThe ingredient list says grated onion and the method says onion juice. They are the same thing in period practice — grate the onion on a fine rasp and use the pulp and liquid that comes off it. Half a teaspoon is deliberate restraint; the filling is meant to taste of ham.
- Cream Salad DressingNot whipped cream and not modern bottled dressing. Dressings of this name in the period were generally cooked dressings thickened with egg, sharpened with vinegar and let down with cream; check the book's own recipe for the exact formula. Mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of cream and a few drops of vinegar stands in acceptably; use only enough to bind, or the filling will slump instead of heaping.
- The moldAny small oval or round bowl works. Butter it, pack the hot seasoned spinach in firmly with the back of a spoon, and hold it over simmering water until serving. It unmolds cleanly only if the spinach was properly drained and the butter well worked through.
- Temperature of the assemblyThe recipe keeps the spinach hot over hot water but says nothing about the eggs, which will be at room temperature unless you warm them. Either way, assemble at the last minute; eggs left standing on a hot platter take on a sulfurous edge.
- YieldFive eggs give ten stuffed halves around a molded center: a vegetable course to serve alongside a roast.
Molded spinach ringed with garnish is a domesticated echo of French service, where a purée of greens was dressed into a shape and surrounded by croutons, eggs or sippets rather than simply spooned out. Spinach is one of the first substantial greens of the northern spring, and eggs were plentiful in the same weeks, a seasonal pairing long associated with the Lenten and Easter calendar. The deviled filling here is not the modern yolk-and-mustard formula but a forcemeat of sieved yolk and minced ham bound with cooked dressing — closer to the potted and deviled preparations of the nineteenth century, where "deviled" indicated seasoning and spice rather than any particular recipe. The instruction to simmer bacon with the greens and then remove it is characteristic of the period's frugal seasoning.