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Spinach
1/2 peck spinach 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter Pick spinach over carefully and wash thoroughly through several cold waters. Place spinach in large kettle without water, set over low flame and cook slowly till juice is drawn. Then cook rapidly for 10 minutes, or until tender if spinach is old. Drain, saving the strained spinach water for soup stock. Serve with the butter and salt. Spinach may be chopped fine if preferred.
A plain waterless boil of the kind that dominated American vegetable cookery before steaming came back into fashion. Almost everything depends on how much water clings to the leaves after washing.
- Half a peckA peck is eight dry quarts, so this is four quarts of loose leaves, on the old market weights something in the region of 2 to 2.5 lb of untrimmed spinach. Enough for about four modest servings.
- Washing is the whole jobSpinach sold loose and unwashed carries grit in the crown of every plant. Three changes of cold water, lifting the leaves out each time rather than pouring off, is what the original means by "several cold waters."
- No added waterThe water still on the leaves is the cooking liquid. Do not shake the spinach dry, and use a wide heavy pot with a lid so the first leaves wilt before the top ones scorch.
- Ten minutes is longModern bagged spinach is young and tender and is done in two to four minutes, as soon as it slumps and turns dark. The ten-minute figure assumes coarse field spinach with thick stems; hold to it only for large-leaved bunches with woody ribs.
- The pot liquorSaving the drained liquid for stock is sound and worth doing, though it is strongly mineral and slightly bitter. Use it as part of the liquid in a soup rather than as the whole of it.
- DressingTwo tablespoons of butter to this quantity is generous by modern habit; a tablespoon is usually enough. Add the salt after draining, since salting early draws out more liquid than you want.
- ChoppingIf chopping, drain hard first dash press the spinach against the side of a colander dash or the chopped result will be watery on the plate.