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Vegetables: Drain
Drain the blanched spinach and chop fine, return to the saucepan, and add salt, pepper, and butter. Place on the fire, and cook ten minutes.
Heap in a mound on a hot dish, and garnish with hard-boiled eggs cut in slices.
Spinach Cooked without Water.
Young, tender spinach can be cooked without water. When well washed, put in a stewpan over the fire; cover, and cook for ten minutes.
Turn it several times during the cooking. Put it in a chopping bowl and mince fine. Return to the stewpan and add seasonings, allowing for peck spinach 2 generous tablespoonfuls butter and a teaspoonful salt. Simmer ten minutes; if very tender, five minutes will be sufficient.
Cucumber Sautéd.
Boil pared and quartered cucumbers for three minutes. Drain the pieces, and season with salt and pepper. Roll in flour, and cook in a saucepan with butter for twenty minutes. This dish may be varied by adding minced parsley and chives about five minutes before the cooking is finished.
Stewed Tomatoes.
Peel tomatoes and cut in small pieces. Put into a stewpan on the fire. Boil gently twenty minutes or half an hour. Season five minutes before the cooking is finished. Allow for each quart tomato 1 teaspoonful salt and sugar and 1 tablespoonful butter.
Scalloped Tomatoes.
A run of plain vegetable preparations from the era when almost everything green was boiled twice. The methods are sound, but several of the times were set for tougher, older market produce than what reaches a modern kitchen.
- "For peck spinach"A word has dropped out of the original, most likely "for each peck." A peck is 8 dry quarts, a large amount of loose leaves, and spinach was commonly bought and measured by the peck at the time, so the figure may be as intended; 2 tablespoons of butter and a teaspoon of salt is light seasoning for that bulk. Scale the seasoning down in proportion for the smaller quantity a modern cook will actually be cooking.
- Squeeze before choppingThe hinge of the first two recipes is drainage. Wet spinach will not take butter or seasoning; press it hard in a sieve or twist it in a towel before it goes in the chopping bowl, or the finished mound will weep on the dish.
- The second ten minutes is optionalBlanched, chopped spinach needs only two or three minutes over heat to warm through and absorb butter. Ten more minutes turns it grey-green and flat. The book's own note that "five minutes will be sufficient" for very tender leaves is closer to the mark for anything bought today.
- Cooking without waterThis is still the best method. Washed leaves carry enough water on them; a covered pan over medium heat wilts a panful in three or four minutes, not ten. Turn it as directed so the top layer does not steam unevenly.
- Stewpan and "on the fire"A stewpan is a wide, straight-sided saucepan with a lid. "Place on the fire" means direct stovetop heat, medium unless the recipe says gently.
- Sautéd cucumber timingTwenty minutes in butter after a three-minute boil will collapse a modern cucumber into mush. Six to eight minutes over medium heat gives browned flour and flesh that still holds its shape. Use firm cucumbers, seeded if large, and salt them briefly to draw off water before flouring.
- Stewed tomatoesTwenty to thirty minutes is right if you want the liquid reduced; very ripe, juicy tomatoes may need longer. The teaspoon of sugar per quart reads as a corrective for acidity rather than a sweetener -- taste before adding it. A 28 oz can of whole tomatoes, broken up, stands in for a quart of fresh.
- YieldThe stewed tomatoes make roughly four to six servings for a quart of fruit. "Scalloped Tomatoes" is a heading cut off at the end of the page and has no instructions here.
These entries sit in the vegetable section of a household cookery book of the sort that supplied proportions more than technique. Blanching, draining and chopping spinach and then finishing it in butter was common nineteenth-century practice, and a change of water was often said to correct grit and bitterness. Cooking young spinach in nothing but the water clinging to the washed leaves, as the second recipe directs, is now simply how it is done. Sliced hard-boiled egg on chopped spinach is an old pairing; in later restaurant French cookery "a la florentine" came to denote a dish set on spinach, frequently with eggs. The sugar in the stewed tomatoes reflects a common period practice of correcting the fruit's acidity.