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Spinach, Green, for Colouring Soups, Sweet Dishes, Etc
Wash any quantity of spinach, and put it with the moisture still clinging to it into a mortar, and pound it to pulp. Press it through a sieve, or squeeze it in a cloth to obtain as much juice as possible from it. Pour the juice into a jar, and set this into a pan of water on the point of boiling, and let it simmer for half an hour. Cover it up, and keep it in a cool place till wanted. If soup is to be coloured, mix a little greening with a little boiling stock, and add this to the soup. If sweet dishes are in question, mix a little of the prepared juice with finely-powdered sugar, and add this to the ingredients. Time to poach the juice, three or four minutes.
This is vert d'épinards — spinach chlorophyll coagulated out of the raw juice and used as a natural green dye for soups, sauces, icings and creams. The technique is straightforward, but the original gives two different cooking times and no yields at all.
- Never let it boilThe point is to warm the juice until the green coagulates into a soft curd that can be lifted off or strained out. A hard boil turns the chlorophyll a dull olive-brown and the colouring is spoilt. Keep the water bath at no more than a bare simmer; the original gives no temperature, only water "on the point of boiling".
- The two conflicting timesThe body of the entry says half an hour in a water bath; the tag line at the end says three or four minutes. The short time is probably the working one — in the classic method the curd forms within a few minutes of the juice clouding, and prolonged standing heat does the colour no favours.
- Mortar and sieveA blender or food processor does the pounding in seconds, and a juicer does better still. Press the pulp through a fine sieve, then wring it hard in muslin or a clean tea towel; the juice must be free of fibre or the colouring will speck whatever it is added to.
- Yield"Any quantity" is unhelpful. Reckon on about 1 lb of raw spinach yielding roughly half a cup of juice and a scant tablespoon or two of green curd — enough to tint a quart of soup or a batch of icing. It is a small return for a large bag of leaves.
- Wash carefullyThe leaves go in raw and the juice is only briefly warmed, so any grit or field soil ends up in the finished colouring. Wash in several changes of cold water and lift the leaves out rather than pouring off, so the sand stays behind.
- Colour lateStir the greening into soup off the heat, or at the very end; held at a simmer the colour fades. The original directs you to slacken it with a little boiling stock first rather than dropping the cold greening straight into the pot.
- Keeping"A cool place" meant a larder. This is a fresh vegetable juice with no acid, salt or sugar to protect it: refrigerate it and use within two or three days, or freeze it in an ice-cube tray. It does not keep on a shelf.
- For sweet dishesRubbing the greening into powdered sugar disperses it evenly and stops it streaking through creams and icings. At this concentration the spinach contributes very little flavour.
Green spinach colouring — vert d'épinards — was standard equipment in the professional French kitchen of the nineteenth century. Before coal-tar dyes became cheap and widely available in the later Victorian decades, a cook who wanted green peas soup to look like peas, or a pistachio cream to look like pistachios, made the colour from leaves: spinach for green, cochineal for red, saffron or egg yolk for yellow, burnt sugar for brown, indigo or violet for blue. The trick of coagulating the chlorophyll out of the raw juice in a gentle water bath is long established in French practice, and it survives in classic cookery as the base for beurre vert and green herb sauces. Its persistence in a late-Victorian domestic dictionary shows how much professional practice had filtered down to the well-run middle-class household.