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Cream of Spinach Soup
Pick over and wash very thoroughly 2 quarts of spinach; change the water four or five times to make sure that all sand is removed. Have ready a large kettle partly filled with boiling salted water; boil for fifteen minutes, drain and drop into cold water (this heightens the color); drain again, pressing as dry as possible; then chop and pound to a pulp. Have ready 1 quart of thin white sauce made with 2 scant tablespoonfuls of butter, 3 tablespoonfuls of flour and 1 quart of milk. Add a little of this, a spoonful at a time, to the pulp, stirring and rubbing that it may be smoothly blended. Put on the fire and stir almost constantly until the soup reaches the boiling point; add salt and pepper to taste, and strain. Return to the fire until scalding hot, then serve with tiny croutons or add 1/2 cupful of whipped cream.
A straightforward flour-thickened cream soup whose only real fault is the boiling time. Everything else translates directly.
- The fifteen-minute boilSpinach is done in two to three minutes in boiling salted water, and a quarter of an hour destroys both colour and flavour. Since the leaves are then pounded, strained and cooked again in the sauce, the initial blanch only needs to wilt them.
- Two quarts of spinachThis is a loose volume measure of raw leaves, not weight — roughly 10 to 12 ounces of trimmed spinach, or one large supermarket bunch. Bagged washed spinach still benefits from one rinse, though the four or five changes of water were aimed at field-grown, sandy bunches.
- The cold waterWorth keeping. Dropping the drained leaves into cold water stops the cooking and fixes the green; the original's claim that it "heightens the color" is accurate in effect if not in mechanism.
- Chop and pound to a pulpA blender or food processor does this in seconds, though it will not fully replace the later straining, which catches the coarse fibre. Press the blanched spinach genuinely dry first or the soup will be thin.
- Thin white sauceTwo scant tablespoons butter and three of flour to a quart of milk is a light béchamel. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding milk so the soup does not taste of raw flour.
- Tempering the pulpAdding the sauce a spoonful at a time to the spinach, rather than the reverse, is what keeps the purée from seizing into lumps. It is the one instruction here that repays following literally.
- Yield and finishRoughly a quart and a quarter of soup — four generous or six small servings. The half cup of whipped cream is best folded in or spooned on at the table rather than cooked into the soup; do not let it boil.
Cream soups built on a flour-and-milk base were a staple of American soup cookery from the late nineteenth century onward: a quart of milk and a few spoonfuls of flour turned a cheap vegetable into a course that looked like a restaurant dish. The technique is the béchamel tradition arriving in domestic-science kitchens by way of the cooking schools, where the standard ratios — so much butter, so much flour, so much milk for thin, medium or thick sauce — were taught as arithmetic. The insistence on repeated washing is a reminder of what buying spinach meant before triple-washed bags: leaves came out of the ground with the ground still on them, and grit in a strained cream soup could not be hidden.