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Vegetables: Boil
To Boil Spinach.
To clean spinach, cut off the roots, break the leaves apart and drop in a pan of water, rinsing them well. Continue washing in clean water until there is no sand left in the bottom of the pan. Drain and blanch. For peck spinach have 3 quarts boiling water and 1 tablespoonful salt. Let it cook ten minutes, counting from the time it begins to boil. Put the spinach in a colander, and pour cold water over it. Drain well, and chop.
Spinach with Cream. 2 cupfuls boiled spinach, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper, 1 cupful scalded cream.
Mince the spinach. Put the butter in a saucepan on the fire. When hot, 2 cupfuls boiled spinach, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, teaspoonful pepper, 2 eggs, 3 teaspoonfuls salt.
Two linked preparations: a plain blanch, then the same spinach finished in a butter-and-cream sauce. The blanching time is the one instruction worth ignoring outright.
- Ten minutes is far too longSpinach leaves are cooked through in a minute or two in boiling salted water, a little longer for very mature leaves. The ten minutes here produces the drab olive mush that older cookery accepted as normal. Lift the leaves the moment they collapse.
- A peckA peck is eight dry quarts, a volume measure rather than a weight. Loose spinach leaves at that bulk weigh perhaps a couple of pounds, though any such conversion is rough, and the boiled yield will not necessarily correspond to the 2 cupfuls the cream version calls for.
- Three quarts of waterPlenty of water helps the pot return to a rolling boil when the leaves go in, which is what preserves the colour -- though 3 quarts is modest for a full peck of spinach. A tablespoon of salt to three quarts seasons the leaves as they cook.
- The cold water is not optionalPouring cold water over the drained spinach stops the carryover cooking and sets the green. Ice water is better still. Then squeeze the mass hard in your hands or press it in the colander -- wet spinach will thin the cream sauce to nothing.
- GritThe repeated washing is genuine advice, not padding. Bunched spinach grown in sandy soil holds grit at the leaf base; lift the leaves out of the water rather than tipping the bowl, so the sand stays behind.
- The cream sauceTwo tablespoons butter and one of flour make a light roux; cook it a minute without colouring, whisk in the scalded cream, then fold in the minced spinach and warm it through. Adding the cream hot, as the original directs, helps it combine smoothly with the roux.
- Pepper quantityThe pepper measure has lost its fraction in this printing. A quarter teaspoon of white or black pepper suits two cupfuls of spinach; season at the end and taste.
- YieldTwo cupfuls of cooked spinach in cream serves three to four as a side dish.
Boiling greens hard and long, then chopping and reheating them in butter or cream, is a common nineteenth-century treatment on both sides of the Atlantic; the French epinards a la creme is the same idea with a richer sauce. Household manuals of this period often give the plain boil first and then a dressed-up version built on the same base.