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Spinach, Dressed
Pick the leaves from the stems, wash them well, and throw them into a large saucepan, and salt them. If old, the spinach must have a little boiling water with it. Boil fast for ten minutes, then strain on the back of a sieve or colander; press the spinach in a napkin, and squeeze out all the water that remains. Put the spinach into a stewpan with a little butter, pepper and salt, and about ten minutes before serving place it on the stove to be made hot; add about half a cupful of cream, pile the spinach on the dish, and send to table. "When spinach," says M. Ude, "is dressed to put under meat, whether fricandeau or sweetbread, etc., it must be more highly seasoned than when dressed for entremets, and a little more liquid, as it is like sauce. Spinach is often used in sweet dishes to dye the almonds or make the green colour of the marbled biscuit. Pound in the mortar some of the spinach, and squeeze the juice out of it by pressing it through a towel; put the liquor into a small stewpan, and place the stewpan in a hot-water bath to poach. When the green is settled at the bottom of the stewpan, drain it through a silk sieve, and use it for almonds, or whatever else requires green."
A straightforward buttered spinach purée with a bonus: the tail end of the entry is the classic method for spinach green, the natural food colouring that preceded bottled dyes.
- Cut the boiling timeTen minutes of fast boiling will turn young spinach to khaki sludge. One to two minutes in a large pot of salted water is enough for tender leaves; genuinely coarse late-season spinach with thick stems may want three or four.
- "Salt them" with no added waterThe instruction is to put the washed, still-wet leaves into the pan with salt only, which draws out enough moisture to steam them. This works, but a wide pan and a lid are essential, and only old spinach needs the splash of boiling water mentioned.
- Volume lossThe recipe gives no quantity. Reckon on 1 lb of raw spinach per two people as a side dish, or 2 lb if it is to be pressed and puréed under meat — after squeezing, a pound of leaves reduces to roughly a cupful.
- Squeeze harder than feels reasonableThis is the hinge of the dish. Any water left in the leaves will thin the butter and cream into a grey pool on the plate; wring the drained spinach in a clean towel until no more liquid comes.
- Pans and colourUse stainless steel or enamel. Bare cast iron, aluminium and old tinned copper can all dull the green.
- Stewpan, entremets, fricandeauA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan. An entremets here means a vegetable dish served in its own right rather than as a bed for meat. A fricandeau is a larded, braised cushion of veal.
- The creamHalf a cupful is generous for a modest amount of spinach; add it warm, off a high heat, and let it reduce briefly rather than boiling it into the butter. Season again at this point, and more assertively if the spinach is going under meat.
- Spinach greenPounding raw leaves and pressing out the juice gives a green liquor; heating it gently in a water bath coagulates the chlorophyll-bearing solids, which are then collected on a fine sieve. Cheesecloth or a fine nylon sieve replaces the silk. Keep the bath below a simmer — boiling turns the extract brown and the whole point is lost.
The M. Ude quoted at length is Louis Eustache Ude, the French chef who by his own account cooked for Louis XVI's household and later worked in England for the Earl of Sefton and at Crockford's club, and whose The French Cook (1813) went through many editions in Britain. Cassell's habit of quoting him by name, decades after his death, shows how completely English cookery writing still deferred to French professional authority. The second half of the entry is the older and more interesting part: before commercial colourings, vert d'épinards was the standard kitchen green, worked into almond pastes, marbled biscuits and pistachio creams. The water-bath method survives in classic French practice, where the same pressed extract is used to tint sauces and butters.