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Spinach with Cream
Prepare the spinach the same as previously directed, but substitute cream for stock and add one teaspoonful of granulated sugar. Serve in a heated vegetable dish. 1/2 peck of sorrel, 1 gill of veal stock,
A variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already read the preceding spinach method, and the trailing line of ingredients belongs to that earlier preparation. A few things need translating before it can be cooked.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Here it is the quantity of liquid moistening the purée, so the cream substitution means about half a cup of cream to the batch.
- Half a peckA peck is eight dry quarts, so half a peck is four quarts of loose leaves. Note that in the trailing line this quantity is given for sorrel, not for the spinach.
- Sorrel in the ingredient lineThe listed sorrel is not called for in this variation and appears to belong to an adjacent recipe. Sorrel is sharply acidic and can cause cream to split; if you want it, cook it separately and fold it in off the heat, or leave it out entirely.
- Veal stockSuperseded by the cream in this version, so it is not needed. If you are working from the parent recipe instead, unsalted chicken stock is the nearest thing most kitchens keep.
- The sugarA teaspoon will not read as sweetness in the finished dish; it tends to soften the mineral edge spinach carries. Add it with the cream and taste before adding more salt.
- Cream and acidSpinach purée holds a good deal of its own liquid. Squeeze the cooked leaves hard before adding the cream, then reduce gently rather than boiling hard.
- Iron and tinIron pans can dull cooked greens to a grey-brown. Stainless or enamelled pans keep the green.
Creamed spinach as it appears here follows a French kitchen method long established in American and English household books: the leaves blanched, pressed dry, chopped or sieved to a purée, then bound with stock or cream and finished with butter. The pinch of sugar is a familiar part of the older treatment, and the *épinards à la crème* of French practice sometimes includes it for the same reason. Books of this kind were written when spinach came to the kitchen by the peck from a market garden, unwashed and full of grit, and the volume of the raw ingredient explains measurements that look absurd against a modern bagged half-pound.