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CHAPTER XI: Spinach
SPINACH Carefully cut off the roots, discard discolored leaves, but retain the inner heart-leaves that are not fully opened. Wash in many waters; wash from one pan to another as long as sand is seen in the bottom of the pans. If the spinach is wilted, let it freshen, after it is trimmed, by standing in cold water, before beginning to wash it. Finally rinse from a pan of clean water into a saucepan. Sprinkle a teaspoonful of salt over the top and set to cook. Press the spinach down in the saucepan as it becomes heated, and turn it over, that all the leaves may become heated, and cook without adding other water than clings to the leaves from the washing. When done turn into a colander, press out the juice and dispose in a mound on a serving dish. Serve as "greens." One-fourth a peck is enough to buy at one time.
CHOPPED SPINACH Prepare, cook and drain the spinach as above, chen chop very fine (in a wooden bowl); add a tablespoonful of butter, one-fourth a teaspoonful, each, of salt and pepper and return to the saucepan; stir over the fire until the spinach is hot throughout; turn into a vegetable dish and dispose on it a hard-cooked egg, shelled and cut in halves lengthwise.
LEFT OVER SPINACH Press the chopped spinach very compactly into two small cups and set aside in a cool place. Turn from the cups onto lettuce leaves. Serve with French dressing or with oil and vinegar.
Three linked preparations from one pot of spinach: plain leaf spinach, buttered chopped spinach with egg, and a moulded salad from what is left. The method is sound and needs only a few translations.
- Timing is the whole thingThe original gives none. Mature leaf spinach collapses in 3 to 5 minutes over medium heat, baby spinach in about 2. Once the leaves have all gone dark and limp, it is done; further cooking turns it grey and metallic.
- A quarter peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so this is 2 quarts of loose leaves as measured at market. In practice buy about 1 to 1 1/4 lb of untrimmed bunch spinach, which cooks down to roughly a cup and serves two.
- No added waterThe water clinging to the washed leaves is genuinely enough, but the pan must be covered and the heat moderate for the first minute so steam builds before the leaves release their own liquid. A wide saucepan works better than a tall one.
- Washing in many watersBunch spinach still carries grit, and lifting the leaves out of the water rather than pouring water off them is what leaves the sand behind. Bagged prewashed spinach skips this step entirely.
- Pressing out the juicePress firmly, but the expressed liquid can be kept and saved for soup if you like. Pressed hard and dry, spinach takes butter better.
- SaltA full teaspoon sprinkled over 2 quarts of raw leaves reduces to a reasonable seasoning once the volume collapses, but taste after draining before adding the further quarter teaspoon in the chopped version.
- ChoppingA wooden bowl and chopper give a coarse, dry texture. A knife on a board does the same work; a food processor makes purée, which is a different dish.
- The hard-cooked eggEggs cooked 10 to 12 minutes off the boil, then cooled in cold water, halve cleanly and stay bright yellow. This garnish is what turns the vegetable into a light supper for two.
- The moulded leftoverPressed spinach unmoulds cleanly only if it is well drained and thoroughly chilled, ideally several hours. Keep it refrigerated rather than in a merely "cool place," and eat it within a day.
Spinach in American cookbooks of this period is often treated the way it is here: cooked in nothing but its own washing water, pressed, and either mounded as "greens" or chopped with butter. The insistence on repeated washing reflects a market where spinach came in from the field with soil still on it, sold loose by the peck rather than trimmed and bagged. The chopped version dressed with a halved hard-cooked egg follows the pattern the period called à la crème or simply "spinach with egg," a borrowing from French vegetable cookery that gave a plain green a course of its own. The third entry is characteristic of a book written for a household of two: a small quantity of a perishable vegetable is not thrown out but pressed into cups and served cold the next day as salad, which is the same domestic thrift that produced moulded rice and shaped cold potato of the same decade.