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Pepper and Salt (Pick all the stalks off)
Pick all the stalks off the spinach, wash it well in several waters, and put it into a stewpan with the drops of water that hang to the leaves; let it boil till thoroughly tender, then rub it through a wire sieve. Put it back in the stewpan with two ounces of butter, half a gill of cream, and a little pepper and salt; mix well till it is thoroughly hot, then serve with croûtons round it.
A Victorian purée of spinach, dressed with butter and cream and framed with fried bread. The original gives no weight of spinach and no yield, so the proportions below are a working guide.
- QuantitiesTwo ounces of butter and half a gill of cream (about 4 tablespoons, or 1/4 cup) would suit something in the region of 2 lb of raw spinach, serving about four; the original names no quantity, so treat this as a working guess. Buy generously — spinach collapses dramatically in volume as it cooks.
- A gillAn imperial gill is 5 fluid ounces, a quarter of a pint, so half a gill is about 2 1/2 fluid ounces, roughly 1/4 cup. 'Cream' in Victorian British books was generally richer than modern single cream, closer to heavy or double cream.
- Cooking in its own waterThe clinging rinse water is genuinely enough — spinach releases plenty of liquid. Cover the pan for the first minute to build steam, and turn the leaves once.
- "Till thoroughly tender" is shortModern spinach collapses in two to three minutes over good heat. Long boiling gives dull, grey leaf; the purée keeps its colour only if the cooking is brief.
- Drain hardThe step the recipe assumes rather than states: press the cooked spinach firmly in a colander or wring it in a cloth before sieving. Wet spinach makes a purée that weeps on the plate no matter how much butter goes in.
- The wire sieveA food mill or a few pulses in a processor does the same job in a fraction of the time, though the texture will not be identical to hand-sieved purée.
- FinishingReheat gently and stir the butter in off a fierce flame; boiling after the cream goes in dulls the colour and can split the sauce. Season at the end, after the water has gone, or it will taste flat.
- CroûtonsHere these are triangles or heart shapes of bread fried in butter or clarified butter, stood around the edge of the dish — not the small cubes sold for salads. Fry them just before serving so they stay crisp against the purée.
- A note on the title"Pepper and Salt" is an indexing artefact of the original book, not the name of the dish. This is a purée of spinach.
Sieved spinach enriched with butter and cream — épinards à la crème, or in the English kitchen simply "spinach purée" — was a fixture of late nineteenth-century high-class cookery, where vegetables were expected to arrive smooth, moulded and surrounded by something crisp. The fried bread croûtons set upright around the dish were a standard piece of restaurant and country-house presentation, borrowed from French garnishing practice and said to have been used around other purées as well. The instruction to cook the leaf in nothing but its rinse water is still sound: spinach is around ninety per cent water, and adding more only leaches out flavour and colour. What dates the recipe is the wire sieve, a labour-intensive tool that a household with kitchen staff could afford to use and which the food mill and blender later replaced.