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Spinach Soup No. 2
1 pound spinach 1 quart boiling water 1 1/2 ounces flour 1/2 pint milk 1 1/2 ounces butter Wash, and pick the spinach; put it into the boiling water with a little salt. Boil with the lid off till the spinach is tender--about ten minutes. Run through a hair sieve. Melt the butter in a saucepan; stir in the flour, and add the milk gradually. Cook for five minutes. Add the spinach puree. Boil. Season and serve.
A plain white-sauce soup that stands or falls on how long the spinach sits in heat. Everything else is a béchamel.
- The hinge: keep the greenSpinach loses its colour and turns to hay-flavoured mush with long heat. Ten minutes in boiling water was standard when the leaves were coarse, mature and field-grown; bagged modern spinach is tender in two to three minutes. Once the purée goes into the sauce, bring it barely to a boil and serve.
- Weights to volume1 1/2 ounces flour is about 1/3 cup; 1 1/2 ounces butter is 3 tablespoons. That is a thick roux for the half-pint of milk called for, which is why the soup is meant to be loosened with the spinach puree.
- The ambiguous pintIf the book is following British measure, 1/2 pint is 10 fluid ounces; in American measure it is 8 ounces, one cup. Either works — start with a cup of milk and thin further with the spinach cooking water.
- Don't throw out the cooking waterThe recipe never says what becomes of the quart of boiling water. Sieving carries some through with the leaf, but the rest holds most of the soluble flavour. Reserve it and use it to thin the finished soup to the consistency you want.
- Hair sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair. Hair was often said to be preferred to metal for acidic and green purees, though such sieves also predate cheap fine wire mesh. A blender or food processor followed by a pass through a fine strainer gives a smoother result in a fraction of the time.
- Pan materialCook the spinach in stainless steel or enamel. Bare cast iron or unlined aluminium will dull the colour and can leave a metallic edge on the finished soup.
- Seasoning"Season" here means salt and pepper, white if you have it. Nutmeg is a frequent companion to spinach in cookery of this period, though this recipe does not call for it. A squeeze of lemon at the table lifts it considerably.
- YieldRoughly three cups of finished soup, closer to a quart if thinned with the reserved cooking water; two to four servings depending on how it is served.
Soup chapters in cookbooks of this period lean heavily on the roux-and-milk formula seen here, because a butter-and-flour base supplied the body and richness that a meat stock would otherwise have given -- and the numbering of this recipe implies a Spinach Soup No. 1 elsewhere in the same book, a variation on thickening and enrichment rather than on flavour. The instruction to wash and pick the leaves before anything else reflects spinach sold ungraded and gritty. Boiling greens uncovered to hold their colour was a rule of nineteenth-century English cookery, repeated in household manuals for generations; the underlying chemistry, that trapped volatile acids dull the chlorophyll, was not spelled out but the practice was sound.