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Spinach, Croustades Of
Cut some bread into the shape of hearts, and slit them all round, then fry them in butter. Arrange the hearts in the form of a rosette. Next cut a round of bread, which slit in the same way, and place it in the centre over the points of the hearts. Fry them till they are of a fine brown, then cut out the interior, take out all the crumb, and fill the space left with spinach, dressed either with cream or consomme.
A garnish rather than a dish in its own right — fried bread cases filled with creamed spinach, arranged as a rosette on a flat platter. The original assumes you know how a croustade is hollowed, so that is the part worth spelling out.
- The hinge: slit before frying, hollow afterCut the heart and round shapes from bread at least half an inch thick, then score a line all round the top surface about a quarter-inch in from the edge, cutting down but not through. Fry, and the scored lid lifts out cleanly so you can pull the soft crumb from inside, leaving a crisp-walled case. Trying to hollow the bread first gives you a case that collapses in the fat.
- BreadDay-old firm white bread with a close crumb. Fresh bread drinks butter and soft supermarket sandwich loaf will not hold a wall; a pain de mie or a dense white tin loaf is what this wants.
- Frying fatWhole butter can brown and burn before the bread takes colour. Use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, in a moderately hot pan. Drain the cases upside down on paper so the hollows do not pool fat.
- How much spinachFresh spinach loses roughly nine-tenths of its bulk. Reckon on 2 to 2 1/2 lb of leaf spinach, stemmed, to fill six or seven croustades; frozen leaf spinach, thoroughly squeezed, works and takes about 1 lb.
- "Dressed with cream or consomme"Two finishes, not two recipes. Cream means the spinach chopped and bound with reduced heavy cream or a little thick bechamel; consomme means it moistened with strong stock and butter, which is lighter and appropriate when the croustades border a roast that already has a rich sauce. Either way the filling must be dry enough not to soak the case.
- Assembly and timingFill at the last moment and serve at once. Croustades hold their crispness for perhaps ten minutes against a hot wet filling, no longer. The cases themselves can be fried several hours ahead and re-crisped in a 350F oven for five minutes.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many hearts to cut. A single composed garnish of six to eight hearts around a central round will serve about six as an accompaniment. Scale by making a second rosette rather than a larger one; the centre round is load-bearing.
Croustade is the French term for a crust used as a container, and by the late nineteenth century it covered anything from a hollowed loaf to a fried bread case to a moulded rice shell. Fried bread was one common Victorian solution to the problem of getting a soft, wet puree onto a platter without a puddle. The rosette arrangement is of a piece with the composed-platter aesthetic that produced borders of duchesse potato and fluted croutons -- food was often built into a shape on the dish before it reached the table, and green spinach set in golden bread gave a kitchen a strong colour contrast at very little cost. Heart-shaped croutons remained part of the classical garnish vocabulary well into the twentieth century, and are often seen with boeuf bourguignon.