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Spinach for Garnishing
Wash and cook a half peck of spinach as directed in the preceding recipe. Sprinkle with salt while cooking and boil five minutes. Then throw into a pan of cold water. This preserves the color. Drain, press out the water and chop as fine as possible. Put in a saucepan with one tablespoonful of butter, sprinkle over a tablespoonful of flour. Stir five minutes. Add a half teaspoonful of salt and half a pint of stock. Stir until boiling, add a grating of nutmeg. Take from the fire and stir in two tablespoonfuls of extra butter, and serve as a garnish for spiced beef, beef à la mode or fricandeau of veal.
A thick spinach purée thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, meant to be spooned around a braised roast rather than served as a vegetable on its own. Two things decide whether it works: the shock in cold water, and the butter stirred in off the heat.
- Half a peck of spinachA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts of loose leaves — a large quantity, plausibly anywhere from about 1½ to 3 lb depending on how loosely it is heaped, cooking down to a small amount of chopped spinach. Bagged spinach in 1 lb quantities is the closest modern equivalent.
- Half a pint of stockOne cup. Use a light veal or beef stock to match the roast it garnishes; a strongly reduced commercial stock will overwhelm the spinach.
- The cold-water shockThis is the hinge. Spinach boiled five minutes and left to sit turns olive-drab within minutes; dropping it into cold water (ice water is better still) stops the cooking and keeps the green. Drain and squeeze hard — wet spinach will thin the sauce.
- Five minutes is generousModern spinach, especially young leaf, wilts in one to two minutes. Boil only until the leaves collapse, or the purée will taste flat.
- "Stir five minutes" means cook the flourThe butter and flour need long enough to lose their raw taste but should not colour — the point is a white roux, since browning would dull the green.
- The finishing butterThe two extra tablespoons go in off the heat and must not boil afterwards, or the emulsion breaks and the dish looks greasy. Serve straight away.
- Chopping fineA knife on a board gives the traditional texture. A food processor works but pulses only — run it long and you get a loose green slurry rather than a purée that holds its shape beside the meat.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield or number of servings; a half peck of spinach with a cup of stock makes a quantity intended as a garnish around a roast rather than a vegetable dish in its own right.
Spinach cooked, pressed, chopped and bound with butter and flour belongs to the same broad family as épinards à la crème, though this version is bound with stock rather than cream; in nineteenth-century professional cooking such green purées were often used as a bed or border of colour under sliced meat rather than as a vegetable course. The dishes named here fit that use: beef à la mode and fricandeau of veal are both slow-braised, larded cuts served with their own reduced juices, and green against brown gravy made an obvious contrast. The cold-water plunge to fix the colour appears in other cookery books of the period. Grated nutmeg with spinach is a long-standing pairing inherited from the older spice-using tradition.