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SPINACH, WITH GRAVY (another way)
Prepare the spinach exactly as in the foregoing recipe. Dissolve two ounces of fresh butter in a saucepan, put in the spinach, and stir it till the butter has dried away. Add a tea-spoonful of salt, a tea-spoonful of sugar, and as much grated nutmeg as will cover a sixpence. Stir it again, and moisten with two table-spoonfuls of highly-seasoned veal broth and a tea-spoonful of chilli vinegar. Stir it over the fire till the liquid is absorbed, and serve very hot. Time, altogether, about an hour. Probable cost of spinach, 3d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A Victorian buttered spinach, finished with stock and a sharp vinegar rather than cream. The whole success of it rests on how dry the spinach is before the butter goes in.
- Squeeze it dry firstThe instruction to stir "till the butter has dried away" only works if the boiled spinach has been drained hard and pressed in a sieve or wrung in a cloth. Wet spinach will stew in its own liquid, the butter will separate, and the added broth will never reduce down.
- The foregoing preparationThe recipe it refers back to is a boiled spinach preparation: picked over, washed, boiled until tender, drained and pressed, then chopped or sieved. It is not a raw wilt.
- QuantityThe recipe names no weight of spinach; to serve six to eight as a vegetable you would need something in the order of 3 to 4 lb raw, which cooks down to a small fraction of its bulk.
- As much nutmeg as will cover a sixpenceA sixpence was a small coin a little under 20 mm across, so this amounts to roughly an eighth of a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg at most. Grate it directly over the pan.
- Chilli vinegarA pantry item of the period: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies, the steeping time varying from days to weeks between recipes. Cider or white wine vinegar with a pinch of cayenne stirred in stands in for it.
- Veal brothUnsalted light chicken or veal stock works. "Highly-seasoned" meant well reduced and aromatic, not merely salty, so use something with body rather than a thin cube.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt on top of seasoned stock is heavy by current taste, particularly if the spinach was boiled in salted water. Add half, taste, and adjust at the end.
- The hourThat figure covers washing, picking and boiling. The finishing in butter takes five to eight minutes over a moderate heat, and spinach held longer than that turns khaki and loses its sweetness.
Spinach cooked to a purée and finished with butter, sugar and nutmeg has a long history in English cookery, and the sweet-spiced treatment goes back well before the Victorians, to a time when spinach appeared as often in tarts and sweetened "herb" dishes as it did alongside meat. What marks this version as late nineteenth century is the pair of savoury correctives at the end: a spoonful of meat broth and a spoonful of chilli vinegar. Chilli vinegar was a familiar bottled condiment in the nineteenth century, made at home by steeping dried capsicums in vinegar, and used to sharpen anything rich or bland. Cassell's, compiled for households running a cook rather than for professionals, gives the cost per pound: threepence to sixpence a pound places spinach among the cheaper greens of the season.