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Spinach Cooked Without Water
Put the spinach in a stewpan, cover, and cook for ten minutes. Press down, and turn the spinach over several times while cooking. At the end of ten minutes turn the spinach into a chopping bowl, and mince very fine. Return to the pan, and add the seasoning, allowing for half a peck of spinach two large tablespoons of butter and a teaspoon of salt. Simmer ten minutes. Only young spinach should be cooked in this way. The leaves should be washed in many waters until not a trace of sand is found.
A waterless braise that relies entirely on the rinse water clinging to the leaves. The method is sound; the timings belong to an era that liked its vegetables thoroughly subdued.
- The hinge: no added waterEverything depends on washing the spinach and putting it into the pan still dripping, then keeping the lid on so the steam stays in. Add water and you get boiled spinach with the flavour in the pot liquor, which is the whole thing this recipe is avoiding.
- Half a peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts of loose leaves — in practice somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 lb of young spinach, though how tightly it is packed makes the figure genuinely approximate. It cooks down to roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups, serving three or four.
- Scale the butter and saltTwo large tablespoons of butter and a teaspoon of salt for that quantity comes to roughly 1 1/2 tablespoons butter and 3/4 teaspoon salt per pound, depending on where in the range the half-peck actually falls. Season after the first cooking, as written, rather than at the start; salt drawn out early gives up more liquid than this method wants.
- Cut the timesYoung spinach collapses in two to three minutes over medium heat, not ten, and a further ten-minute simmer takes it to olive drab. Wilt it just until the leaves give, then chop, then return to the pan for a minute or two with the butter to warm through.
- Washing in many watersThis instruction is not padding. Lift the leaves out of the water rather than pouring water and leaves together through a colander, and repeat until no grit settles in the bowl — bagged triple-washed spinach still benefits from one rinse for the moisture it carries.
- The chopping bowlA wooden bowl and curved chopper produced a fine mince without crushing. A food processor pulsed a few times does the same, though it will go to purée in seconds; a knife on a board is more controllable.
- Pan materialSpinach is high in oxalic acid, which reacts with bare aluminium and untinned cast iron and turns the leaves grey and metallic-tasting. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron.
- Only young spinachMature leaves with thick stalks will not soften in the time given and stay stringy after mincing. Stem anything larger than a hand's breadth, or use the older leaves for a dish with liquid in it.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the wave of American cookbooks published around the First World War, when meat conservation was both a patriotic campaign and a household economy, and its treatment of spinach says more about nutritional belief than about protein. Spinach carried a long-standing reputation as a blood-building, strengthening food — an association usually traced to nineteenth-century analyses of its iron content, and one that persisted well past the point where a plate of greens could stand in for a chop. The waterless method itself is older than the book and is often said to have been promoted by cooking-school writers of the period as a way of keeping the mineral salts in the vegetable rather than pouring them down the sink, an argument that happens to be correct even if the framing around it was not.