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Spinach Mold
1 peck spinach 2 cups white sauce 1/2 cup dry bread crumbs 2 tablespoons butter 2 eggs 1 small onion Cook spinach and mash fine. Brown onion in butter, add to the spinach. Beat egg yolks and stir into white sauce, adding shortening and crumbs. Combine the two mixtures. Cool. Add the beaten egg whites. Place in well greased ring mold, cover and set into frying pan into which has been put hot water. Bake 25 minutes in hot oven 400 degrees. Unmold onto plate, fill center of ring with buttered asparagus tips, garnish with strips of pimiento and slices of stuffed olives.
A vegetable timbale baked in a water bath and turned out as a ring — a staple of 1930s presentation cookery. The quantities are given in market measures rather than kitchen ones, so the spinach needs translating.
- A peck of spinachA peck is a dry measure of eight quarts, which is how greens were once sold rather than how they were weighed. What that weighs in spinach varies a great deal: loosely packed leaves at that volume run perhaps 2 to 3 lb, while the old bushel weights imply nearer 5 lb. Buy 2 to 3 lb and expect roughly 2 cups after cooking and squeezing.
- Squeeze it dryThis is the hinge. Wet spinach will not set with two eggs and half a cup of crumbs, and the mold will slump when turned out. Press the cooked spinach hard in a sieve or twist it in a towel before mashing.
- The white sauceA medium bechamel: 4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk, seasoned. It should be thick enough to mound on the spoon before the yolks go in, and off the heat when they do so they do not scramble.
- "Adding shortening and crumbs"The ingredient list allots the 2 tablespoons butter to browning the onion, so the shortening called for here is unquantified. A further 2 tablespoons butter stirred into the sauce is a reasonable reading.
- The frying pan of hot waterThis is a bain-marie. Any roasting pan or deep skillet that holds the mold with an inch of hot water around it will do; cover the mold with foil or a fitted lid so the surface does not crust.
- Oven and timing400F as written is on the high side for a custard-bound mold even in a water bath. Test at 25 minutes with a knife near the center — it should come out clean and the mixture should be just set, not puffed and weeping.
- UnmoldingLet the mold stand five minutes out of the water, run a thin knife around both edges, then invert onto a warm plate. Turning it out immediately is the usual cause of a broken ring.
- YieldThe mixture comes to roughly five cups, so a 6-cup ring mold suits it; reckon on six or so servings as a vegetable course, with the asparagus filling the center.
Ring molds like this one belong to the era when a dinner was judged on how it looked coming to the table. The technique is the French vegetable timbale, a puree bound with bechamel and eggs and baked gently in water, which American cookbooks had absorbed by the late nineteenth century and which the 1920s and '30s pressed into service for buffet and luncheon menus. The filled center is the whole point of the form: a ring gives you a well for asparagus, creamed mushrooms or peas, and the pimiento strips and sliced stuffed olives supply the red-and-green contrast common in garnishing of the period. Spinach was a natural candidate, being cheap, deeply colored, and — in the decades when vitamin talk first reached the home cook — thought especially worth getting onto the plate.