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Creamed Spinach on Toast
1 pint cooked or canned spinach Toast 1 cup white sauce 1/2 teaspoon salt Drain the liquid from the spinach, and chop. Prepare the white sauce, and add the spinach to it. Add salt, and reheat. Trim the crusts from the bread. Cut into triangular shaped pieces, and toast in a slow oven until crisp and nicely browned. Moisten it in a little hot milk or cream, and serve a spoonful of the creamed spinach upon each slice.
A plain wartime-era supper dish that depends almost entirely on getting the spinach dry and the toast crisp. Two details in the original are worth pinning down: the strength of the white sauce, and the fact that the toast is dried in the oven rather than made in a toaster.
- The hinge: drain hardSpinach holds far more water than it looks. Press the cooked or canned spinach against a sieve, or wring it in a towel, before chopping; otherwise the cup of white sauce thins to a green wash and slides off the toast.
- A pint of cooked spinachThat is 2 cups after draining, which comes from roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of fresh spinach, or about two 14-15 oz cans. The recipe allows either fresh-cooked or canned without stating a preference.
- White sauce, 1 cupThe conventional medium white sauce of this period is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. A thin sauce will not hold the spinach together here.
- Slow ovenRoughly 275-300F. Spread the triangles on a sheet and leave them until dry through and lightly coloured, as the recipe directs. This is oven-dried toast, closer to a rusk than a toaster slice, and it is why the bread survives being moistened.
- Why moisten the toastDipping each crisp triangle briefly in a little hot milk or cream, as directed, softens the surface just enough to marry with the sauce. Do it at the last moment and serve immediately.
- Season past the saltHalf a teaspoon of salt for a pint of spinach is a starting point, not a finish. Grated nutmeg, black pepper and a squeeze of lemon are all traditional with creamed spinach and cost the dish nothing.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; roughly 4 servings as a light lunch or supper course, allowing about two triangles each. It does not hold; make the toast and sauce close to serving.
Creamed vegetables on toast were a staple of meatless cookery in the early twentieth century, when meatless days were promoted both on religious grounds and, during the First World War, as a patriotic economy. A cup of milk-based white sauce did the work of gravy, and dried toast supplied the bulk and structure that a chop would otherwise have given the plate. The technique of oven-drying bread into crisp triangles, then moistening it with hot milk before saucing, is related to the milk toast and cream toast of convalescent and invalid cookery, and similar directions appear in American household manuals of the period. Spinach was also pushed hard by dietary reformers in these decades for its iron and its "mineral salts" -- a reputation later qualified, since the oxalic acid in spinach binds much of that iron.