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Some Kitchen Kinks: Drain
To clean the spinach cut off the roots, break the leaves apart and drop them into a large pan of water, rinse them well in this water and put them in a second pan of water. Continue washing in clean waters until there is not a trace of sand on the bottom of the pan in which the vegetable was washed. If the spinach is at all wilted let it stand in cold water until it becomes fresh and crisp. Drain from this water and blanch. For half a peck of spinach have in a large saucepan 3 quarts of boiling water and 1 tablespoonful of salt. Put the drained spinach in the boiling water and let it boil ten minutes, counting from the time it begins to boil.
When it begins to boil draw the cover of the saucepan a little to one side to allow the steam to escape. At the end of ten minutes pour the spinach into a colander, and when the hot water has passed off pour cold water over it. Let it drain well and mince coarse or fine, as is suitable for the manner in which it is to be served.
One peck of spinach will make about 1½ pints when blanched and minced.
Spinach with Cream. ½ peck spinach. 2 tablespoonfuls butter. 1 tablespoonful flour. 1 teaspoonful salt. ½ teaspoonful pepper. ½ pint cream or milk.
Blanch and mince the spinach. Put the butter in a saucepan and on the fire. When hot add the flour and stir until smooth and frothy, then add the minced spinach and the salt and pepper. Cook for five minutes, then add the milk or cream, hot, and cook three minutes longer. Serve.
Spinach with Egg. ½ peck spinach. 3 tablespoonfuls butter. 1/2 teaspoonful pepper. 2 eggs. 3 teaspoonfuls salt.
A workmanlike set of instructions for washing, blanching and dressing spinach, with the quantities given in dry measure. Two things need attention before you start: the fractions are garbled in this text, and the boiling time belongs to another era.
- The broken fractionsThe repeated "1½ peck" and "1½ teaspoonful pepper" are almost certainly ½ peck and ½ teaspoonful, mangled in transcription. Read them that way; a peck and a half of spinach would be an absurd amount for a dish thickened with one tablespoon of flour.
- What a peck of spinach weighsA peck is a quarter bushel, eight dry quarts. Spinach is bulky and light, so a peck is usually reckoned at roughly 4 to 5 lb of untrimmed leaves and half a peck at 2 to 2½ lb. Trimmed supermarket spinach in 10-oz bags will take three or so to approach half a peck of the old market kind, which included stems and roots.
- Ten minutes is too longModern spinach, picked young and sold clean, is done in 1 to 2 minutes in boiling salted water. The ten-minute boil here assumes coarse, mature, thick-stemmed spinach; applied to supermarket leaves it produces grey-green sludge with most of the flavour left in the pot.
- Why the lid comes offThe recipe says only that drawing the cover aside lets the steam escape. The traditional explanation is that it allows volatile acids to escape rather than condense back onto the leaves, keeping the green from turning olive; on that reasoning you may as well blanch uncovered from the start.
- The cold water mattersChilling immediately halts cooking and sets the colour. Then squeeze the spinach hard in your hands or in a towel; wet spinach added to a roux will thin the sauce and refuse to take up the butter.
- Pan materialSpinach is high in oxalic acid, which reacts with bare cast iron and unlined aluminium to give a metallic taste and a dull grey cast. Use stainless steel or enamel for both the blanching and the creaming.
- YieldThe book's own figure -- one peck giving about 1½ pints blanched and minced -- works out to roughly 3 cups, or four modest side servings. Half a peck gives about 1½ cups, enough for two.
- The washing is not optionalField spinach carried real grit, which is why the instruction is to keep changing water until the bottom of the pan is clean. Triple-washed bagged leaves need only a rinse, but bunched spinach from a market still deserves the full treatment.
- The egg version is incomplete"Spinach with Egg" lists its ingredients and then stops. Comparable period recipes tend either to fold the blanched spinach into hot butter, season it, and garnish with sliced hard-boiled egg, or to stir beaten egg in off the heat to bind it -- but the method is missing from this page.
Spinach reached European kitchens from Persia by way of the Arab Mediterranean and had long been a spring vegetable of the kitchen garden by the time American household manuals took it up. The blanch-chop-cream sequence here is essentially the French épinards à la crème, a dish long established in the repertoire before it appeared in print in English.