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Some Kitchen Kinks: Wash
Wash and blanch the spinach, using two teaspoonfuls of the salt in the water in which the vegetable is boiled.
Drain the blanched spinach and chop rather fine, return it to the saucepan, and add the salt, pepper, and butter.
Place on the fire and cook ten minutes. Heap in a mound on a hot dish and garnish with the hard-boiled eggs, cut in slices.
Spinach Cooked without Water.- Fresh spinach when washed holds enough water for cooking. Put the spinach in a stewpan and on the fire; cover and cook ten minutes. Press down and turn the spinach over sev- APPENDIX eral times during the cooking. At the end of ten minutes turn the spinach into a chopping bowl, and mince rather fine. Return to the stewpan and add the seasonings, allowing for half a peck of spinach two generous tablespoonfuls of butter and a teaspoonful of salt. Simmer ten minutes; or if very tender five minutes will be sufficient.
Spinach cooked in this manner will retain all its salts. It will be more laxative and the flavor stronger than when blanched (boiled in water). In young, tender spinach this is not objectionable, but when the overgrown vegetable is cooked in its own moisture the flavor is strong and somewhat. acrid.
Two methods for spinach, printed one after the other: a blanched-and-buttered version whose ingredient list has been lost at the head of the page, and a waterless method that is still the better technique. Read the second one as the main recipe.
- The text starts mid-recipe"two teaspoonfuls of the salt" and "the hard-boiled eggs" refer to a list that appeared above this fragment. Quantities are guesswork: something on the order of 2 lb spinach, a couple of tablespoons of butter, salt and pepper, and one or two hard-boiled eggs for garnish.
- Half a peckA dry peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts of leaves. Weight equivalents vary a good deal with how the leaves are trimmed and packed; somewhere in the region of 2 to 3 lb of untrimmed spinach is a fair estimate, cooking down to a side dish for four. Two generous tablespoonfuls of butter to that quantity is the recipe's own ratio.
- The hinge: no added waterThe second method is right, and it is how spinach is still cooked. The water clinging to washed leaves is enough; cover the pan and let the steam do the work, turning and pressing the mass so the top leaves reach the bottom.
- Cut the times hardTen minutes covered, then ten more simmering, was written for coarse market spinach with thick stems. Modern bagged or bunched spinach collapses in 2 to 3 minutes and needs only another minute or two after chopping and seasoning. Longer gives you an olive-drab, metallic result.
- "Blanch" here means boilThe author uses blanch in the older sense of cooking through in salted water, not a brief dip and shock. That is why the first method needs no further boiling — only ten minutes of finishing with butter.
- Why the boiled version tastes milderBoiling water leaches out oxalic acid and mineral salts along with the strong flavour. That is the trade the recipe is describing when it says the waterless spinach "retains all its salts" and is more laxative. Anyone watching oxalate intake may prefer the boiled method.
- Pan choiceCook and chop spinach in stainless, enamel or glass. Bare cast iron and aluminium react with the acids in the leaves and turn the finished dish grey.
- Drain properlyBefore chopping, press the cooked spinach against the side of the pan or squeeze it in a sieve. Butter will not emulsify into a watery mass, and the mound will not hold its shape on the dish.
Spinach cooked in nothing but its own moisture, then chopped and enriched with butter, is a household method that turns up in American domestic manuals of the period. What dates this entry is its confidence about nutrition: the claim that undrained spinach "retains all its salts" and is therefore "more laxative" belongs to the turn-of-the-century enthusiasm for mineral salts in food, a preoccupation that peaked a decade or two before the vitamin era and gave spinach its long-standing and only partly deserved reputation as a health food. The advice about overgrown leaves being acrid is sound observation rather than theory — mature spinach accumulates more oxalic acid, which is what gives it the chalky, tooth-coating quality.