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Spinach Salad No. 2
2 cups cooked spinach 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon paprika 3 tablespoons French dressing 2 tablespoons lemon juice Grated yolk of 3 hard cooked eggs Mix above ingredients, arrange on lettuce leaf, garnish with chopped egg whites and pimientoes.
A cold salad built on leftover cooked spinach, dressed and bound with grated egg yolk. The whole thing takes ten minutes if the spinach and eggs are already cooked.
- Drain the spinach hardTwo cups of cooked spinach holds a surprising amount of water, and any that remains will thin the dressing into a puddle. Press it in a sieve or wring it in a towel before chopping and mixing.
- Chop, do not puréeChop, do not pur\es the spinach's form unstated -- The recipe does not say how the cooked spinach should be cut; chopped rather than pur\eed suits the mounded presentation better than a smooth creamed spinach. Frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed, stands in well for two cups.
- French dressing, 1930s senseHere it means a simple oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- SaltA full teaspoon for two cups of spinach is heavy by current taste, especially with a salted dressing already going in. Add half, taste, then adjust.
- Hard cooked eggsThree yolks grated on the fine side of a box grater melt into the dressing and act as the thickener. Reserve the whites, chop them, and keep them dry until serving so they stay distinct.
- PimientoesJarred pimiento strips or roasted red pepper, drained and blotted; they are for colour against the dark spinach as much as flavour.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities would probably serve about four as a first-course salad. Assemble on the lettuce shortly before serving, as the acid in the lemon and dressing will dull the spinach's colour on standing.
Salads of this kind, in which a cooked vegetable is chopped, dressed, mounded on a lettuce leaf and finished with sieved egg and pimiento, filled the salad course of American menu books through the 1920s and 1930s. Grated hard-cooked yolk was a common garnish of the era, sometimes called mimosa when scattered over greens, and here it does double duty as a thickener. The "No. 2" in the title implies the book carried more than one spinach salad, and cold cooked spinach was a practical way to use up the previous day's vegetable.