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Eggs and Spinach
Prepare some spinach by washing it very carefully, and then boiling till tender. Put it into cold water to keep the colour good, and when quite cold, press the water out of it, a little at a time, in a towel. Chop it very fine, and put it into a stewpan with a lump of butter and some rich gravy. Boil it quickly in this, and add pepper, salt, and nutmeg. Or it may be stewed with cream and a little sugar, which is a very delicate method. Poach six eggs, and trim them neatly. Serve them upon the spinach. Time, ten to fifteen minutes to boil; five minutes to stew. Probable cost, 4d. per pound. Sufficient for three persons.
A Victorian luncheon dish that survives intact as eggs Florentine, minus the mornay. The only real adjustment is the spinach timing.
- Cut the boiling timeTen to fifteen minutes in water was standard when spinach was mature and coarse-leaved. Modern bagged spinach is tender in 60 to 90 seconds; even large-leaf bunched spinach needs no more than three. Beyond that it turns khaki and loses body, and the later quick boil in gravy will finish it.
- QuantityThe recipe gives none, only a price per pound. Fresh spinach loses roughly nine-tenths of its bulk, so allow 1 1/2 to 2 lb raw for three people, or about 10 oz frozen leaf spinach, thawed and squeezed.
- The cold-water plungeThis is not fussiness. Dropping the cooked leaves into iced water halts the acid breakdown of chlorophyll and keeps the green. Then wring it dry in a towel a handful at a time, as directed — spinach holds an astonishing amount of water and will thin the gravy or cream otherwise.
- "Rich gravy"In period usage this generally points to a reduced meat stock with body rather than a flour-thickened pan sauce, though the book does not define it here. A few spoonfuls of good veal or beef stock reduced to a glaze, or a commercial demi-glace, gives the intended effect. Two or three tablespoons is enough for the whole dish.
- The cream versionThe cream-and-sugar alternative is the better of the two and closer to modern creamed spinach: heavy cream, a pinch of sugar to offset the mineral edge of the leaf, reduced until it just coats. The sugar should not be tasted as sweetness.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use less than instinct suggests — a light dusting over the whole pan. The spinach-nutmeg pairing runs through European cookery and is what makes the dish read as period rather than plain.
- Poaching and trimming"Trim them neatly" means cutting away the ragged skirt of set white with scissors or a knife once the egg is lifted from the water, so it sits as a clean oval. Very fresh eggs need less trimming. Poach three to four minutes for a liquid yolk and drain on a cloth before plating.
- ServingThree portions, as stated, as a light lunch or supper dish. Toast or fried bread beneath or alongside suits it, though the recipe does not call for any.
Cassell's places this among its plainer egg dishes, but the combination of poached eggs on dressed spinach is old and well travelled: in French kitchens anything served à la florentine sits on a bed of spinach, a usage generally traced to the Italian cooks associated with Catherine de' Medici's arrival in France, though that attribution is traditional rather than documented. Spinach was cheap enough — fourpence a pound here — to appear on modest tables, and nineteenth-century writers on health commonly recommended it as a wholesome, cleansing vegetable. The two treatments offered, brown gravy or cream with sugar, suggest a division in the period's cooking: the first belonging to the meat-stock tradition, the second to the lighter, dairy-based style the book here calls "delicate."