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Herbs, Fried
Pick, wash, drain, and finely mince two handfuls of spinach, one of parsley, and four or five young onions. Put them into a stewpan, with a pinch of salt, one ounce of butter, and one table-spoonful of broth. Put on the lid and stew them gently, shaking the pan frequently, and be careful they do not burn. Fried herbs are often served as an accompaniment to calf's liver. Time, ten or fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 2d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A quick greens sauté in all but name, meant as a sharp green foil to rich offal. The main thing to sort out is the vague Victorian measurement by handful.
- "Fried" is a misnomerNothing here fries. The lid goes on, the butter and broth make steam, and the greens sweat down in their own moisture. Treat it as a covered braise and keep the heat low.
- Two handfuls of spinachA handful is not a fixed measure, and the book gives no weights. Read it as a loose double handful of picked leaves to one of parsley. That two-to-one ratio makes for a generous amount of parsley by modern taste.
- Young onionsMost likely spring onions or scallions, green tops included, rather than shallots or mature bulb onions. Four or five slim ones is only a couple of ounces trimmed.
- Mince finely, and mean itThe dish has almost no liquid and no texture beyond the chop. Cut everything to a fine mince before it goes in the pan, as the original directs.
- One tablespoon of brothThat is the whole liquid, and it is meant only to stop the butter catching before the spinach releases its own water. Do not add more, or you will end up boiling the greens and having to drain them.
- TimingTen to fifteen minutes suits the older, coarser spinach the book assumed. Bagged young leaf spinach collapses in three or four minutes; give the onions and parsley a head start and add the spinach at the end.
- Cost and yieldTwopence marks this as a cheap green garnish rather than a dish in its own right. It serves three or four as an accompaniment, as the book says, not as a vegetable course on its own.
- SeasoningA pinch of salt and butter is all the original gives. Black pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, or a squeeze of lemon at the end are all in period and all improve it against liver.
"Fried herbs" in English cookery books means a dish of chopped green stuff softened in butter, not dried aromatics; herbs in this older sense covered spinach, sorrel, parsley, beet tops and whatever else the kitchen garden offered. The pairing with calf's liver is traditional rather than fixed, and it belongs to the same logic as onions with liver: something green and slightly bitter to cut a rich, mineral meat. Recipes of this shape appear across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often labelled Staffordshire fashion, and Cassell's, an alphabetical dictionary, gives it under H as a cheap, standard side rather than anything showy. The costing of twopence, quoted as a matter of course, is a reminder that this dictionary was written for households that budgeted a dinner to the penny.