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To Serve Spinach
This vegetable must be washed thoroughly in several waters to free it from grit. To do this lift it out of the water in both hands, a small quantity at a time. The stalk must be pulled from each leaf before boiling. Put the prepared spinach into an empty saucepan, sprinkle a little salt over it, and stir it constantly to prevent burning. Boil the spinach till it becomes tender. Place the boiled spinach on a colander or sieve, press it, chop it on a clean board, put it into a saucepan, add butter and broth--taking care, however, not to thin it too much with the broth--and taste whether it is salt enough. Stir it over the fire till the liquid is absorbed, pile on a hot dish, and serve. Half an ounce of butter and 1 tablespoonful of cream, or broth, will be enough for 1 pound of spinach. If cream a day old is to be obtained, we may finally incorporate a little flour with it, and add the whole to the spinach. To embellish this dish, cut milk bread into slices, forming the crust into points, fry in butter till yellow, prepare hard-boiled eggs cut in quarters lengthwise, and serve the spinach, placing round it first an egg and then a crust alternately.
A classic French-style creamed spinach, boiled dry in its own moisture rather than in water, then chopped and finished with butter and cream. The technique still works; only the timing needs adjusting.
- The empty saucepan is deliberateSpinach carries enough water from washing to steam itself, and the salt draws out more. Add no liquid at the start, keep the lid on for the first minute, and stir as directed so the leaves touching the metal do not scorch.
- "Till tender" means two to four minutesNineteenth-century kitchens boiled greens far longer than we do. Modern spinach collapses almost at once; take it off as soon as the leaves have wilted and turned dark, or the finished purée will be drab and flat-tasting.
- Use a non-reactive panSpinach is high in oxalic acid, which pulls a metallic taste and grey colour out of bare aluminium or unlined cast iron. Stainless steel or enamelled iron is better for both the boiling and the finishing.
- Stems and modern bunchesPulling the stalk from each leaf is worth doing with mature bunch spinach, whose stems stay stringy. Baby-leaf spinach sold in bags needs no stemming, though it is already washed and will give up less water in the pan.
- Quantities and yieldHalf an ounce of butter is about one tablespoon, and one tablespoon of cream per pound of raw spinach is a light hand by current taste. A pound of raw spinach cooks down to roughly a cup of chopped puree, which serves two as a side dish.
- "Cream a day old"This probably means cream that has thickened and slightly soured on standing; the nearest equivalent today is creme fraiche or a full-fat soured cream. Whisk the flour into it off the heat so it goes in smooth, then let the spinach cook a couple of minutes more to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Milk bread and the garnishMilk bread is a soft enriched white loaf; brioche or a plain white sandwich loaf both work. Cut the slices into triangles, fry in butter until just golden, and set them round the mound alternately with the egg quarters at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- Broth as the alternativeIf you use broth rather than cream, keep it to a spoonful or two. The dish should hold its shape when piled on the plate, which is why the recipe insists on stirring until the liquid has been absorbed.
Cooking spinach in nothing but the water clinging to its leaves, then draining, pressing and chopping it to a puree finished with butter, is a method associated with French cookery and found in nineteenth-century English and American household manuals. The garnish of fried bread points and quartered hard-boiled eggs marks this as the dressed-up version of an everyday vegetable, the sort of arrangement that let a cheap green stand as a course of its own. Consolidated compilations like this one gathered such continental methods alongside plainer domestic fare, and the insistence on lifting the leaves out of the water by hand rather than pouring the water off them is a reminder that market spinach of the period arrived genuinely sandy, grit being the one fault a cook could not disguise.