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Spinach Salad
Pick over, wash and cook one-half peck of spinach. Drain and chop fine.
Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice and add one tablespoon of melted butter.
Butter small tin molds slightly and pack solidly with the mixture. Chill, remove from mold and arrange on thin slices of cold boiled tongue, cut in circular pieces.
Garnish base of each with parsley and serve on top of each sauce tartare.- Stella A. Downing.
A moulded vegetable salad of the sort that filled the cold-course pages of American cookbooks around 1900. Nothing here is difficult, but two ingredients — the spinach measure and the tongue — need translating.
- Half a peck of spinachA peck is a dry measure of eight quarts, so this is four quarts of loose uncooked leaves, roughly 1 to 1.5 lb depending on how tightly it was heaped. Cooked and squeezed it collapses to about a cup and a half of packed purée, which fills four to six small moulds.
- Cook it brieflyThe recipe says only 'cook', which in period usage could mean anything up to boiling until soft. Two to three minutes of wilting is enough; longer turns it grey and washes out the flavour the lemon is meant to sharpen.
- Squeeze it dryThis is the hinge. Any water left in the leaves will keep the mould from setting and will run out onto the tongue on the plate. Press the chopped spinach hard in a sieve or twist it in a towel before seasoning.
- The mouldsSmall tin moulds means individual dariole or timbale cups, about 1/3 cup each. Buttered ramekins, teacups or a muffin tin do the same work. Chill at least an hour; the mixture holds its shape because it is packed solidly and cold.
- Cold boiled tongueWhole beef tongue, simmered until tender, skinned while warm, pressed and chilled — an ordinary butcher's item then, a special order now. Sliced cured tongue from a good deli is the practical substitute; cut rounds with a biscuit cutter to match the moulds.
- Sauce tartareIn this period a mayonnaise base with chopped capers, gherkins, onion or shallot and parsley, sometimes with a little mustard. It is spooned over the top of each mould rather than pooled underneath.
- Yield and serviceFour to six as a first course or luncheon salad. Everything can be assembled a couple of hours ahead and kept cold; sauce the moulds just before they go to the table so it does not slide.
Moulded salads like this belong to the era when a cold luncheon dish was judged largely on its architecture: vegetables were chopped, packed into timbale cups, turned out and dressed up with a garnish and a sauce, in imitation of the restaurant service of the day. Boiled tongue was the natural partner — a cheap, well-flavoured cut served cold — and its dark red rounds set off the green of the spinach in exactly the way a period cook wanted. The recipe carries an attribution to Stella A. Downing, a reminder that collections of this kind were built from recipes contributed under their cooks' own names, so a salad chapter reads as a cross-section of what American home cooks were actually putting on the table rather than what a professional chef thought they should.