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Spinach Salad
Boil a peck of spinach, season, and mould in 6 claret glasses. Arrange 6 slices of cold boiled tongue or ham on lettuce leaves. Turn out the contents of each claret glass on a slice of the meat. Cover with French dressing, and garnish with boiled eggs.
A late-Victorian luncheon salad built on a trick of presentation: cooked spinach packed into a wine glass, chilled, and turned out as a neat dome on cold meat. Everything depends on getting the water out of the spinach.
- Drain hard, or the plate floodsCooked spinach holds an enormous amount of water. Squeeze it in a towel or press it in a sieve until no more liquid runs, then chop and season. Any moisture left behind will thin the dressing and slide the mould off the meat.
- How much spinachA peck is a dry measure of 8 quarts; period market tables reckon a bushel of spinach at around 18-20 lb, so a peck is roughly 4-5 lb of leaves. That is more than six small glasses need. Work from the finished quantity instead: about 3 cups of well-drained cooked spinach will fill six glasses, which takes something like 3 lb of raw leaves.
- Claret glassesA claret glass of the period held about 4 fl oz. Any small stemmed glass, ramekin, teacup or dariole mould of that size works; oil the inside lightly so the spinach releases cleanly.
- Season with intent"Season" here means more than salt. Butter or a little of the dressing, salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit boiled spinach, and it should taste finished before it goes into the glasses, since nothing is added afterwards but the dressing and the egg garnish.
- Chill before turning outThe recipe does not say so, but packing the glasses firmly and refrigerating them for an hour or so makes the turning-out easier; cold, compressed spinach holds a dome better than warm.
- Cold boiled tongueWhole beef tongue is a butcher order now and takes 3 to 4 hours of simmering plus peeling. Sliced cold ham, called for as the alternative, is the practical substitute and needs no explanation to modern eaters.
- French dressingIn cookbooks of this period the term means a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine; the proportions vary from book to book, commonly somewhere between two and four parts oil to one of vinegar. It does not mean the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- YieldSix individual salads, each a first course or the centre of a light lunch. Quarter the hard-boiled eggs lengthwise and set them around the base.
Moulded vegetable salads like this one belong to the turn-of-the-century fashion for serving food in individual portions with a defined shape, a habit borrowed from professional service and carried into ambitious home cooking. The wine glass used as a mould suggests a kitchen improvising with what was on the sideboard rather than with a set of dariole tins. Cold boiled tongue, which reads as an oddity now, was a common cold meat in English and American larders — a large cut, cooked once and eaten through the week — and its appearance alongside ham as an either-or option suggests how routine it was. "French dressing" in American cookbooks of this era distinguished oil-and-vinegar from the mayonnaise-based dressings that filled out the same chapters.