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Spinach Mould
Take the remains of some cooked spinach, and mix thoroughly together with two chopped boiled Spanish onions, then turn them into a stewpan with two ounces of butter, a table-spoonful of stock, and pepper and salt to taste. When quite hot, mix again, and press tightly into a buttered basin or mould. Heat in the oven for about ten minutes, then turn out carefully, and garnish neatly with rounds of hard-boiled egg.
A leftovers dish that depends entirely on how dry the spinach is: a wet mixture will collapse the moment you invert it. Everything else here is straightforward.
- Squeeze the spinach hardCooked spinach holds an enormous amount of water, and this mould has no starch, egg or gelatine to bind it. Press the spinach in a sieve or wring it in a tea towel until no more liquid comes out, then chop it fine so it packs rather than slides.
- Spanish onionsStill sold under that name — the large, mild, pale-skinned onion. Two of them will outweigh the spinach unless the spinach quantity is generous; if you are working from a single portion of leftovers, use one onion. Boil them until fully soft, drain very well, and chop..
- "A table-spoonful of stock"That is all the liquid the dish wants, and it is there to loosen the butter rather than to moisten the vegetables. Resist adding more.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and ranges of the period were not calibrated in any case. A moderate oven for the stated ten minutes is all that is needed — the mixture is already hot, and this step only sets the surface and warms the mould through.
- The mould itselfA pudding basin, small charlotte mould or ramekins all work. Butter generously, pack the mixture in with the back of a spoon to eliminate air pockets, and let it stand a minute out of the oven before turning out; unmoulding straight from the heat is when they slump.
- SeasoningSpinach and boiled onion are both bland and both watery, so this needs more salt than seems reasonable, and pepper freshly ground. A grating of nutmeg is the traditional partner to spinach and would not be out of place.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity for the spinach, so the yield depends on what is left over; the remains of about a pound of raw spinach plus the onions would serve roughly four as a side dish. Serve at once — it is a hot dish and does not hold. The egg rounds go on after turning out, not before.
Vegetable moulds of this kind belong to a late-Victorian and Edwardian style of service in which almost anything could be pressed into a shape and turned out for the table, borrowed from the French repertoire of timbales and subrics but simplified for a domestic kitchen with a single cook. The instruction to "take the remains of some cooked spinach" places this among the reheated-leftovers entries in Cassell's — the book was written for households where a joint or a dish of greens was expected to reappear in a different guise, and where making the reappearance look deliberate mattered as much as the taste. The rounds of hard-boiled egg do that work: yellow against dark green, a garnish that costs almost nothing and signals that the dish was intended rather than salvaged. Spinach with butter and onion is far older than the mould, but the mould is very much of its moment.