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Spinach
Wash a half peck of spinach through several waters, to free it from grit. Pick over carefully, cut off the roots. Wash again, drain by taking up in handfuls, shaking, and pressing out all the remaining water. Put in a kettle, add a cupful of water, stand over the fire and boil without
A plain nineteenth-century method for boiled spinach, given by volume rather than weight. The text breaks off mid-instruction, but the surviving portion carries the important part: washing, and the small amount of added water.
- Half a peckA peck is eight dry quarts, so half a peck is four quarts of loosely packed leaves. What that weighs depends entirely on how tightly it is heaped, and it cooks down to a small fraction of its raw bulk.
- Grit is the whole battleField spinach carries sand in the crumpled leaf. Lift the leaves out of the water rather than pouring the water off them, so the grit stays behind in the basin, and change the water until none settles.
- A cupful of water is deliberateSpinach is mostly water and will release plenty of its own. The cup is there only to keep the bottom of the pot from scorching before the leaves collapse; bagged supermarket spinach, still wet from rinsing, often needs none at all.
- The missing instructionThe sentence stops at "boil without" — possibly "without a cover," though the missing words cannot be recovered. Uncovered cooking was held to let volatile acids escape and keep the leaves green rather than olive-drab. Young spinach in any case needs only a few minutes, not the quarter hour older books sometimes ask for.
- Roots and stemsSpinach of this period was sold as whole plants with the pink crown attached, hence "cut off the roots." Modern bunched spinach needs only the coarse lower stems removed; baby leaf needs nothing.
- Draining afterPress the cooked spinach in a colander or squeeze it in a cloth before dressing it. Common nineteenth-century finishes — butter, a little cream, chopped hard egg, a squeeze of lemon — are spoiled by the water the leaves hold.
Spinach reached English and American kitchens as a spring vegetable of the kitchen garden, cut young and sold in bunches with the root still on, which is why so many old receipts begin with an order to trim roots and wash through "several waters" — garden soil clung to the crimped leaf and there was no washed, bagged product to buy. Measuring it by the peck rather than the pound reflects how it was bought: greens went by dry volume at market, like apples or potatoes, and cooks judged quantity by the basketful. The instruction to boil it in barely a cupful of water belongs to a long-standing strain of English advice that spinach should stew in what clings to its own leaves, both for flavour and for colour.