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Eggs with Spinach
4 or 5 eggs ½ peck spinach (2 lbs.) 3 heaping tablespoonfuls (3 Salt and pepper ozs.) butter Wash the spinach carefully to remove all dirt and grit, then put it into a saucepan, put on the cover, and cook for ten minutes. Add the butter, salt, and pepper to taste; allow it to cook slowly for one hour in its own juices.
Divide it into buttered ramequins, making it into neat little nests. Drop an egg into each of these nests, and bake for eight minutes in a moderately heated oven.
The whites of the eggs should harden, but the yolks should be soft.
Serve very hot. 4 egg yolks 1/4 lb. (1/2 cup) butter I onion 1 tablespoonful flour
A straightforward baked-egg dish whose only oddities are a volume measure for greens and an hour-long braise that modern cooks will want to reconsider.
- The spinach measureA peck is a dry volume measure, about 8 quarts, and loose spinach leaves fill a great deal of space for very little weight. Ignore the peck and take the parenthetical figure: 2 lb of spinach, which cooks down to roughly 2 cups.
- Moderately heated ovenRead this as 350F. At that temperature eight minutes will set the whites of eggs dropped into hot spinach; if the spinach has been allowed to cool, expect ten to twelve.
- RamequinsStandard ramekins, 4 to 6 oz each, well buttered. Shallow ones work better than tall, since the white needs to spread thin enough to set before the yolk firms.
- The hour of slow cookingThis is the instruction most worth revisiting. Ten minutes covered will already cook spinach through; a further hour in butter gives the soft, dark, almost jam-like purée the period liked, but it destroys colour and most of the vitamin C. Twenty to thirty minutes gets you a similar texture with far more of the green left.
- DrainingTwo pounds of spinach releases a great deal of water. Press or squeeze it out before adding the butter, or the nests will weep into the ramekins and the whites will poach rather than bake.
- Butter quantityThree heaping tablespoons is given as 3 oz, which is about 6 level tablespoons or 85 g. The original weight is the reliable figure.
- The trailing line"4 egg yolks, 1/4 lb. butter, 1 onion, 1 tablespoonful flour" plays no part in the method above and appears to be a stray ingredient list from an adjoining recipe. Disregard it.
- YieldFour or five ramekins, one egg each — a light lunch or supper dish for two, or a first course for four.
Eggs baked in a bed of spinach is a fixture of French bourgeois cookery, where anything served à la florentine means on spinach, a name generally traced to the taste of Catherine de' Medici and repeated in cookbooks ever since without much documentary support. The long butter braise reflects an older idea of what cooked spinach should be — reduced almost to a purée, dark and rich — rather than the brief wilting that later became standard as nutritional writers began arguing that vegetables were being overcooked.