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Cream of Spinach with Egg Balls
2 quarts spinach; 1 quart milk; 1 level teaspoonful salt; 1 tablespoonful butter; 1 tablespoonful flour; 1/2 saltspoonful cayenne. Wash the spinach through several waters to remove all trace of sand, carefully examining each stalk to be sure that no insects cling to the leaves. Washing for the last time in strong salted water will remove them. Lift the leaves out of the water and put on to boil; no water is needed, as that which drains from the leaves is sufficient until it begins to cook, when its own juice will be all that is necessary to prevent its burning. Boil until soft enough to put through a coarse strainer or colander; twenty minutes should be sufficient. Rub through the strainer, add the milk, heated to boiling point; then thicken with the flour which has been rubbed into the butter; season, and serve with egg balls.
A plain nineteenth-century cream soup built on spinach's own juice rather than stock. Two details need translating: the measures, and the twenty-minute boil.
- How much spinachTwo quarts of raw leaves, loosely packed, is roughly 8 to 12 oz of fresh spinach — one large supermarket bunch or two 5 oz bagged packs. It cooks down to about a cup of puree.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful of cayenne is 1/8 teaspoon. Enough to warm the milk without reading as heat.
- The twenty-minute boilTwenty minutes was needed to break the leaves down enough to rub through a coarse strainer or colander by hand. Modern spinach wilts in three to five minutes, and long boiling turns the color from green to olive. Cook until fully collapsed, then puree in a blender or food processor.
- Cook it dry, but watch itThe instruction to add no water is sound — washed leaves carry plenty. Use a heavy pan over moderate heat and stir for the first minute or two, before the juice runs, or the bottom leaves will scorch.
- A very thin bindingOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a quart of milk gives a barely-thickened soup, closer to a flavored milk than a modern cream soup. Doubling both to 2 tablespoons produces something nearer what most cooks now expect.
- Add the roux properlyButter and flour rubbed together raw is a beurre manie; whisk it into the hot liquid in small pieces and simmer two or three minutes to cook out the floury taste.
- Egg ballsThe book assumes you know them: hard-boiled yolks mashed smooth with a little raw yolk and flour to bind, rolled small and poached briefly in simmering water, then dropped into the tureen. They were a common garnish for clear and cream soups of the period.
- YieldAbout five cups, serving four as a first course.
Cream soups like this one belong to the dinner service of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where a thin, pale, mildly seasoned soup opened the meal and was expected to whet rather than satisfy. The technique — vegetable cooked in its own moisture, pressed through a sieve, extended with scalded milk and bound with a spoonful of flour — was applied across the whole section of such books: celery, asparagus, corn, green pea. Egg balls gave a plain puree something to chew and a bit of visual interest. The unusually careful washing instructions are a reminder that spinach came from the market or the kitchen garden with grit and insects still on it; the strong salt-water rinse to drive out anything clinging to the leaves was common advice, not fussiness.