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Spinach
Look over the spinach, wash in four waters and take off stalks, boil in a sauce-pan without water for thirty minutes, covering closely, drain in a colander and cut with a knife while draining; season with pepper, salt and a little butter, boil two eggs hard and slice over the top; serve hot. Or it may, when boiled soft, be rubbed through the colander, then put in frying-pan, with a lump of butter, seasoned with pepper and salt. When hot, beat in two or three table-spoons rich cream. Put thin slices of buttered toast (one for each person) on dish and on each piece put a cupful of spinach neatly smoothed in shape, with the half of a hard-boiled egg on the top, cut part uppermost.
Two treatments of one pot of spinach: coarsely chopped with sliced egg, or puréed on toast. The method is sound apart from the timing, which belongs to an era that distrusted underdone vegetables.
- Thirty minutes is the one thing to ignoreSpinach wilted in a covered pan with only the water clinging to the leaves is done in three to five minutes, and it will be olive-drab and bitter long before half an hour is up. Cook until the leaves collapse, then pull it off the heat.
- "Without water" is deliberateThe rinse water left on the leaves is enough to steam them, and it keeps the flavour concentrated. Use a wide pan with a tight lid over medium heat and turn the mass once with tongs.
- Four watersField spinach carried a great deal of sand, and repeated rinsing in standing water was the usual way to shed it. Modern bunch spinach still needs two or three changes; bagged, triple-washed leaf needs none.
- QuantityRaw spinach loses roughly nine-tenths of its bulk. For the toast version, which calls for a cupful per person, reckon about a pound of untrimmed leaf for each serving.
- Non-reactive panSpinach is high in oxalic acid and will take on a metallic taste and grey cast in bare cast iron or unlined aluminium. Stainless or enamelled is better.
- "Rubbed through the colander"This is the period way of making a purée; a food processor or a few pulses with a stick blender does the same in seconds. A colander with fine perforations, or a sieve, gives the smoother texture the original is after.
- The creamBeat it in off the heat or over the lowest flame. Two or three tablespoons into a hot purée will tighten it slightly; boiled hard it will separate and thin the spinach.
- Hard-boiled eggsCook them 9 to 10 minutes for a set but not chalky yolk, then cool in cold water so they peel and slice cleanly. Halve them just before serving so the cut face stays bright.
Spinach reached English and American kitchens as a Lenten and early-spring green, one of the first things out of the kitchen garden, and nineteenth-century cookbooks often pair it with hard-boiled egg and buttered toast, an arrangement generally traced to English practice, where it appears as "spinach with eggs" or on sippets. Buckeye Cookery (1877), compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions, treats vegetables briskly and functionally, and long boiling times were commonly held to reflect both the tougher, more mature garden produce of the day and a general Victorian conviction that green vegetables were safer thoroughly done. The waterless method here is the more interesting survival, given the later campaign to stop cooks from boiling greens in gallons of water and pouring the nutrients down the drain.