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Creamed Spinach
Wash, cook, drain and chop fine ⅓ peck of spinach. In a saucepan melt 1 tablespoonful of butter; add 1 tablespoonful of flour, ½ teaspoonful of salt, ½ of a teaspoonful of pepper and cook for two minutes. Gradually stir in ¾ of a cupful of rich milk until smoothly thickened.
Add the spinach; draw to one side and simmer gently for ten minutes. Serve on toast.
A plain white-sauce spinach that depends almost entirely on how thoroughly the greens are drained. Two details in the text need translating before you start.
- "34 of a cupful"This is an optical-character error for ¾ of a cupful. Three-quarters of a cup of milk against a tablespoon each of butter and flour gives a fairly loose sauce, which is what you want once the spinach releases its remaining moisture.
- Half a peck of spinachSpinach here is given by dry measure rather than weight; a peck is usually reckoned at roughly 4 to 6 lb depending on packing, so half a peck is somewhere around 2 to 3 lb. Buy 2 lb of mature bunch spinach or two 1-lb bags and you are in range. It will cook down to roughly 2 cups chopped.
- The hinge: squeeze it dryAfter cooking, press the spinach hard in a colander or wring it in a towel. Any water left behind will thin the sauce into a green puddle during the ten-minute simmer, and no amount of extra cooking will bring it back.
- Cook the roux, don't colour itTwo minutes over moderate heat is enough to take the raw taste off the flour. Keep it pale — this sauce should be white, and browned flour both darkens the dish and thickens less.
- Half a teaspoon of pepperThat is a great deal by current taste. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust.
- The ten-minute simmerLonger than modern practice, and it dulls the colour. Five minutes off to the side of the burner is enough to marry the sauce and spinach; "draw to one side" presumably keeps the pan off direct heat, where a flour-thickened milk sauce scorches easily.
- Serving on toastThe toast absorbs the sauce and turns a side dish into a light supper. The recipe specifies nothing about the bread beyond "toast".
- YieldNot stated. On the quantities given it should serve about four as a vegetable, or two on toast as a main.
Spinach bound in a butter-and-flour sauce is a common nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American treatment, and it belongs to the large family of dishes built on the same white sauce -- creamed onions, creamed celery, creamed chipped beef. A tablespoon of butter, a tablespoon of flour and three-quarters of a cup of milk stretch a bulky market vegetable into something more substantial, and the slice of toast underneath does the rest. Spinach was among the earlier greens available in spring, and this recipe measures it by the peck rather than the pound -- a measure that suits a leaf so light that weight tells the shopper little.