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Spinach, Plainly Dressed
Pick the leaves from the stalks, and wash the spinach in several waters to free it from sand and grit. Put it into a large saucepan with as much water only as will keep it from burning; add a small spoonful of salt, and turn it frequently till it is quite tender. Drain it on a colander, squeeze it dry, chop it small, and add pepper and salt. Put it, when thus chopped, again into the colander with a small piece of butter, place this upon a saucepan of boiling water over the fire, and turn the spinach about that the steam passing through the holes of the colander may dry the vegetable. When hot and quite dry, serve immediately. Sometimes fried sippets of bread are put round the spinach, or bread fried and cut into dice is sprinkled upon it. Time to boil the spinach, ten minutes or more, according to the age of the leaves. Probable cost, 3d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient, two pounds for four or five persons.
A straightforward Victorian method that assumes gritty, field-grown spinach with tough stalks. Two points do most of the work: the washing, and the second drying over steam.
- The hinge: dry it twiceSpinach holds an enormous amount of water, and the reheating over a pan of boiling water in a colander is there to drive off what squeezing leaves behind. Skip it and the buttered spinach sits in a grey puddle on the plate. A metal colander over a simmering pan works exactly as described; a wide dry frying pan over low heat does the same job faster.
- Washing"Several waters" is not rhetoric for older spinach grown in sandy soil. Modern bagged baby spinach needs one rinse at most, and no stalk-picking. Bunched mature spinach still deserves two or three changes of water, lifting the leaves out rather than pouring off.
- Ten minutes is far too longThat timing suits thick, mature summer leaves. Young spinach collapses in one to two minutes in the water clinging to it, and anything more turns it khaki and metallic. Judge by the leaf, not the clock.
- QuantityTwo pounds is close to 900 g of raw spinach, which cooks down to very little. The book's yield of four or five is honest; a single bag of supermarket spinach serves one or two.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of fried bread; the diced version is a crouton in all but name. Fry in butter or good oil and add at the table so they stay crisp.
- SeasoningSalt is added twice here, once to the cooking water and once after chopping. Go light on the first if you are salting again later. Nutmeg is often paired with spinach and butter in period cookery, though this recipe leaves it out.
- Cost note"3d. to 6d. per pound" is pre-decimal British currency (pence per pound), useful mainly as a rough indication of what the book expected spinach to cost.
Cassell's treats its plainer vegetable dishes as teaching examples, and this one belongs less to any regional tradition than to a general method: it demonstrates the boil-drain-squeeze-chop-reheat sequence that Victorian cookery applied to almost every leaf vegetable. The chopped, buttered pur o to have been a common English presentation of spinach in the nineteenth century, and the closely related French "épinards à la crème" and the older practice of pressing the purée into a mould for garnish are often said to reflect the same handling. The insistence on cooking with barely any added water is the sound part of the method and has survived intact; the ten-minute boil has not. Spinach itself reached western Europe by way of Arab Spain, the name descending from Persian aspanakh through Arabic.