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Spinach Soup No. 1
1 quart liquid from boiled spinach 1 ounce butter 1/2 pint milk 1 ounce flour Melt the butter; stir in the flour, add the milk gradually, mix well, and cook for ten minutes. Add the spinach liquid; boil. Season and serve.
A plain white-sauce soup built on the water left from boiling spinach, from an era when throwing out cooking liquid was thought wasteful. The whole dish depends on that liquid actually tasting of something.
- The spinach liquidA quart of it is the water a substantial quantity of spinach was boiled in, not a light rinse. If your cooking water is thin, reduce it or simmer additional spinach stems and leaves in it before straining; otherwise the soup is milky flour-water.
- UnitsA pint here is 20 fl oz if the book is British, 16 if American, so 1/2 pint is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; an ounce of flour is a scant 1/4 cup. That makes a very loose roux for 5 to 6 cups of liquid in total.
- Cook the roux properlyThe ten minutes of cooking after the milk goes in is the one instruction that matters. It is there to cook out the raw flour taste, and it needs a low flame and frequent stirring or the bottom scorches and the whole pot tastes of it.
- Add the spinach liquid last, and brieflyBring it just to a boil and stop. Spinach liquid held at a boil dulls from green towards olive-brown; the colour is the only visual appeal the soup has.
- Oxalic acid and curdlingCurdling -- Spinach water can make the milk look grainy. Adding the warmed spinach liquid into the milk base, which is the order the recipe gives, and keeping the pot below a rolling boil both help.
- Seasoning"Season" here presumably means salt and pepper. The soup needs more salt than you expect because boiled spinach water is bland, and a grating of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon at the end would not be out of period.
- YieldAbout 5 to 6 cups, serving four as a first course. Best served the day it is made; the colour dulls on standing and it does not reheat well.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of Anglo-American cookbooks written for meatless and Lenten tables, when cooks were pressed to extract food value from what would otherwise go down the drain. Vegetable cooking water was believed to hold the "salts" and nourishment leached out in boiling, an idea that predates vitamin chemistry but happens to be broadly right, and soups like this one are the practical result. The technique itself is nothing more than a thin béchamel let down with stock, the standard base for the whole family of Victorian and Edwardian pur he spinach liquid for pea, asparagus or celery water and the same page would serve. The numbering as "No. 1" tells you the book carried at least one further version.