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Spinach with Cream
1/2 peck spinach 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon pepper 1/2 pint cream or milk Cook and mince the spinach. Put the butter in a saucepan, and on the fire. When hot, add the flour, and stir until smooth and frothy, then add the minced spinach, salt and pepper. Cook for five minutes, then add the milk or cream hot, and cook three minutes longer.
A plain creamed spinach built on a thin roux. The only real difficulty is the produce measure, which is given by volume in a market unit that no longer exists.
- Half a peck of spinachA peck is 8 dry quarts, so this is 4 quarts of loose uncooked leaves — somewhere in the range of 1½ to 2 lb as spinach is sold now, though loose-packed leaf volume varies enough that the figure is genuinely approximate. Expect it to cook down to roughly 2 cups once squeezed and minced.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup. Cream of the period was often thinner than modern heavy cream, nearer what we would call light cream; heavy cream will give a noticeably richer, tighter sauce, and whole milk a looser one.
- The hinge: dry the spinachCooked spinach holds a great deal of water, and one tablespoon of flour cannot absorb it. Press the minced spinach hard in a sieve or twist it in a towel before it goes into the butter, or the finished dish will be soupy no matter how long it cooks.
- Cook the flour, don't brown it"Smooth and frothy" is the correct description of a white roux — perhaps a minute over moderate heat. Colour here would muddy the flavour and the green.
- Add the milk hotThe instruction is deliberate; period white-sauce directions consistently call for hot liquid, which blends into a thin roux quickly. With only a tablespoon of flour to a cup of liquid, and wet spinach already in the pan, hot liquid is the easier route to a smooth sauce.
- Three minutes is enoughThe sauce is thin by design and thickens only slightly. Longer simmering dulls the colour to olive without improving the texture.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of pepper is assertive for four servings; add half of it and taste. Nutmeg is a traditional partner to creamed spinach, though this recipe does not call for it.
- YieldServes four as a side, or three as a light main course.
Creamed spinach in this form is a straight application of the butter-flour-hot-liquid white sauce common in American and English cookery of the later nineteenth century, in ratios home cooks were expected to know. If the recipe sits among meat substitutes, that placement reflects the reasoning of the period rather than modern nutrition — spinach was widely believed to be exceptionally rich in iron, a reputation generally traced to nineteenth-century analyses that circulated for decades before being revised, and iron-rich food was understood as the thing meat supplied. Meatless cookery of the era leaned heavily on cream, butter, milk and eggs to give vegetables the substance a diner expected from a main dish. Selling greens by the peck, as this recipe assumes, was ordinary market practice.