Spinach
Pick and soak several hours in cold water. Drain and shake each bunch. Throw in boiling water and boil till tender. Take up with a perforated skimmer. Put in a saucepan with a heaping tablespoonful butter; pepper and salt to taste. Stir in three hard-boiled eggs, chopped up. Let it simmer, stirring frequently. Put in a deep dish and cover with nicely poached eggs, buttered, peppered, and salted. Sea-kale may be prepared by the same recipe.-Mrs. S. T.
A plain dressed spinach turned into a supper dish by the eggs. The only real change modern practice demands is the cooking time.
- Boil briefly, not "till tender"Nineteenth-century spinach came in from the garden with tough stems and grit, and often took several minutes. Trimmed modern spinach wilts in 60-90 seconds in a large pot of boiling salted water; anything beyond two minutes turns it grey and slack.
- The long soak still earns its placeBunched spinach with roots attached holds sand in the crown. Several hours is more than needed, but two or three changes of cold water, lifting the leaves out rather than pouring the water off, is worth doing. Prewashed bagged spinach can skip this entirely.
- Squeeze before it meets the butterThe recipe's skimmer removes the leaves but not the water they hold. Press the drained spinach hard in a colander or twist it in a towel, then chop, or the butter will not cling and the dish will weep in the serving bowl.
- QuantityNo amount is given. Three hard-boiled eggs plus poached eggs on top would suit something on the order of three pounds of untrimmed bunch spinach, which cooks down to a few cupfuls and might serve four to six as a light main course.
- "Heaping tablespoonful butter"Read this as a generous tablespoon, about 20 g. For three pounds of spinach two tablespoons is closer to what the dish wants; add it off the direct heat so it emulsifies rather than browns.
- Simmer only to warm throughThe chopped hard-boiled eggs need heating, nothing more. Prolonged simmering with butter makes the yolks chalky and drives off the last of the spinach's colour.
- Poaching the eggsPoach in barely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, three minutes for a set white and liquid yolk, and drain them on a cloth before they go on the spinach so the dish is not watery.
- Sea-kaleThe blanched shoots of Crambe maritima, once forced under pots in kitchen gardens and now rarely sold. It is a stem vegetable, not a leaf, and needs several minutes' boiling rather than a minute or two; asparagus or chard stems stand in for it reasonably well.
Spinach with chopped egg is a long-established way of dressing the vegetable in English and Anglo-American cookery, where the egg supplies both richness and a foil for spinach's mineral edge. Sea-kale was a fashionable forced vegetable in well-off nineteenth-century gardens on both sides of the Atlantic, blanched under earthenware pots for early spring shoots. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why the recipe ends with a set of initials rather than an author; "Mrs. S. T." is one of many such contributors, and the terse, assume-you-know-how style is typical of recipes written by cooks for other experienced cooks.