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Spinach, with Cream
Boil and drain two pounds of spinach in the usual way. Press it between two plates to free it thoroughly from moisture, and heat it in a clean saucepan with a little pepper and salt and a small lump of butter. When it is dry, add very gradually two table-spoonfuls of boiling cream, and simmer it gently for five minutes. Serve very hot. If liked, gravy may be substituted for the cream. Time to boil the spinach, ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 3d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A late-Victorian side dish that depends almost entirely on how dry you get the spinach before the butter goes in. Everything else is seasoning.
- The hinge: press it truly dryTwo pounds of leaf spinach holds a startling amount of water, and any that remains will thin the cream into a grey puddle. Press hard between two plates, or twist it in a clean towel, until no more liquid runs.
- Two pounds is raw weightThat is roughly 900 g of untrimmed bunched spinach, which cooks down to a small fraction of that weight once pressed. Bagged baby spinach will work but wilts in two or three minutes rather than ten to fifteen, and needs no stem-stripping.
- Ten to fifteen minutes is for mature leavesVictorian spinach came with thick stalks and coarse ribs. Modern mature spinach is done in four or five minutes in a large pan of salted water; longer and the flavour turns flat and metallic.
- "A small lump of butter"Read this as about 1 oz, or 25-30 g, for two pounds of raw spinach. It is there to coat the leaves before the cream, so let it melt into the spinach over gentle heat.
- Boiling cream, added graduallyScald the cream separately and trickle it in, as the recipe directs; the gradual addition lets the spinach absorb it rather than sit in it.
- Chop, or don'tThe book leaves the leaves whole. Nineteenth-century English service often chopped spinach fine or pressed it through a sieve for a smooth purée; either is faithful to the period, and chopping makes the cream cling better.
- The gravy variation"Gravy" here means meat stock or pan juices, not thickened flour gravy. Two tablespoonfuls of concentrated beef or veal stock gives a darker, sharper dish suited to serving alongside roast meat.
- YieldThree or four as a side, as stated. A grating of nutmeg is an obvious modern addition, and nutmeg with spinach does appear in period English recipes.
Spinach dressed with butter and cream belongs to the English adaptation of French vegetable cookery that filled the side-dish pages of Victorian household books, and Cassell's treats it as a matter of technique rather than novelty: boil, press, dry, enrich. The costing, threepence to sixpence a pound, marks spinach as a cheap green with a long English season, sold by weight in bunches with the stalks on, which may be part of why the boiling time given is longer than a modern bag requires. The gravy substitution at the end is the frugal option, letting the same recipe serve either a dinner with cream to spare or one without.<br><br>The habit of pairing spinach with cream and a little nutmeg is generally traced to French practice.