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Puree of Spinach with Butter
Pick the stalks from 3 pounds of spinach, and wash it in two or three waters. Lift it out of the water with the fingers that the sand may settle at the bottom, and put it into a saucepan with as much boiling water slightly salted as will keep it from burning. Keep it boiling till it is tender, and press it under the water occasionally with a wooden spoon. Drain it well; carefully pick away any stalks or fibre that may still remain in it, and rub it through a coarse sieve. Put the pulp into a saucepan with a slice of fresh butter, and a little pepper and salt, and stir it briskly over the fire till it is quite hot. Add a spoonful or two of sauce, and let it remain on the fire, stirring all the time, for five minutes. Serve very hot, and garnish with fried sippets, or pile it in the centre of a dish, and place lamb or mutton cutlets on end round it, the long bones inclining towards each other. Time to boil the spinach, ten to fifteen minutes.
A Victorian spinach puree, built on the assumption that spinach is cooked long and then forced through a sieve. Most of the work translates directly; a few conventions need decoding.
- Ten to fifteen minutes is far too longModern spinach, sold young and tender, collapses in two to three minutes in boiling water. The long boil in the original suits older, coarse-leaved market spinach with tough midribs. Judge by the leaves, not the clock.
- Quantity and yieldThree pounds of raw spinach cooks down to roughly a pound of drained leaf, giving about two cups of puree — four modest servings as a side.
- Washing methodLifting the leaves out rather than pouring off the water is still the right technique for gritty greens. Prepacked triple-washed spinach can skip it.
- Drain hardThe success of the dish rests on getting the water out. Press the cooked leaf firmly in a colander or twist it in a cloth, or the finished puree will be soupy and the butter will not bind.
- "Rub through a coarse sieve"A food processor or blender does this in seconds, though it gives a smoother, more uniform texture than the sieve. For the original slightly rough puree, chop finely by hand or pulse briefly.
- "A slice of fresh butter"Meaning unsalted butter cut from the block — reckon 1 to 2 oz (2 to 4 tablespoons) for this quantity. "Fresh" distinguishes it from the salted or preserved butter that was common.
- "A spoonful or two of sauce"An unspecified reference to whatever sauce the kitchen had going; a bechamel or a good veal or brown gravy would suit. Two tablespoons of cream or bechamel loosens the puree without thinning the flavour.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried in butter, the English equivalent of what is now usually called a crouton. Cut them thin and fry until crisp just before serving.
Spinach reduced to a puree, buttered and enriched with sauce, was common in nineteenth-century English cookery, and the arrangement here — a mound in the middle of the dish with cutlets stood on end around it, bones leaning inward — was a familiar way of serving cutlets in the period. The sieve is the key piece of equipment: before mechanical mixers, a smooth vegetable puree meant labour with a wooden spoon and a hair or wire sieve. Spinach itself was long valued as much for colour as for taste, and cooks also used the pressed green juice as a food dye for sauces and butters.