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Spinach, with Eggs
Wash the spinach in several waters. Pick off all the stalks, reject the decayed and discoloured leaves, and boil the spinach with as much slightly-salted water as will keep it from burning. Leave the saucepan uncovered. Press the spinach under the water occasionally, and let it boil till tender. Put it into a colander, and press the moisture from it with the back of a plate. Mince it finely, then put it into a saucepan with a slice of fresh butter and a little pepper and salt, and stir it well till it is hot and dry. Put it on a hot dish, smooth it with the blade of a knife, and mark it in squares. Place as many poached eggs as there are guests on the top of the spinach, or, if preferred, put them round it, each egg on a piece of buttered toast. Serve the whole very hot. If a superior dish is required, the spinach, after being boiled till tender, may be rubbed through a wire sieve, and the pulp heated with a slice of fresh butter, a table-spoonful of thick cream, and a little pepper and salt. To poach the eggs, proceed as follows. Break the eggs carefully into separate cups. Have ready a small omelet-pan with as much boiling water in it as will cover the eggs. Throw into this a tea-spoonful of vinegar and a pinch of salt. Slip the eggs gently into the water one at a time. As soon as one sets put in another, and boil them gently until done enough. When the yolks are covered with a thin filmy veil, and the whites are firm, lift the eggs out with a slicer, drain them for a moment, and place them on the spinach. Time to boil the spinach, ten to fifteen minutes.
A straightforward Victorian supper dish — eggs sur le plat de épinards — that needs only two adjustments: less boiling and gentler poaching.
- QuantityNo weight is given. Reckon about 2 lb of bulk-bunch spinach for four people, since it loses a great deal of its bulk in cooking. One poached egg per person, as the text says, or two for a main course.
- Cooking timeTen to fifteen minutes was normal when spinach was coarse, mature and thick-stemmed. Modern bagged leaf is tender in one to three minutes; cook it in only the water clinging to the leaves, then press and chop. Overboiled spinach turns khaki and loses much of its flavour.
- Uncovered panThis instruction is worth keeping. Leaving the lid off lets the volatile acids escape rather than condensing back onto the leaves, which is what keeps green vegetables green.
- "A slice of fresh butter"Means unsalted butter cut from the block — about 1 to 2 tablespoons. "Fresh" here signals unsalted, as against the heavily salted keeping butter of the period.
- Pressing and dryingThe hinge of the dish. Spinach holds an astonishing amount of water, and if it is not pressed hard in the colander and then stirred over heat until visibly dry, the eggs will sit in a green puddle. Squeeze harder than feels reasonable.
- The wire sieveFor the "superior" version, a food processor or blender does the same work in seconds; pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want it truly smooth. Add the cream after puréeing, off the boil.
- Poaching temperatureDo not boil the eggs gently or otherwise — water at a full boil shreds the whites. Bring it to a bare shiver, about 180-190F, and hold it there. Three minutes gives the filmy veil over the yolk the recipe describes. A "slicer" is a slotted spoon or skimmer.
- VinegarA teaspoon helps the white set, but more will make the eggs taste sour and toughen the surface. Very fresh eggs need none at all.
- Marking in squaresPurely presentational: the spinach is smoothed flat with the blade of a knife and scored in a lattice, as a green base for the eggs.
Spinach with poached eggs was, by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s, a standard of the English middle-class table — the same combination underlies the dishes later labelled à la florentine, a name generally traced to the Italian cooks associated with the sixteenth-century French court rather than to any documented Florentine original. Its appearance in "The Principles of Cookery" rather than among the made dishes is telling: Victorian manuals treated spinach as an exercise in technique, since the leaf demanded repeated washing (grit was a constant complaint), stalk-stripping and careful draining before it was fit for the table. The two-tier structure of the recipe — a plain version, then a "superior" one enriched with sieved pulp and cream — is characteristic of the book's method of writing for households of very different means from a single set of instructions.