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Spinach, French Mode of Dressing
INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 persons. -2 pailfuls of spinach, 2 tablespoonfuls of salt, 2 oz. of butter, 1 teaspoonful of flour, 8 tablespoonfuls of good gravy; when liked, a very little grated nutmeg.
AVERAGE COST, 9d.
SPINACH-GREEN.
Pick, wash and boil the spinach, and when tender, drain and squeeze it perfectly dry from the water that hangs about it.
Chop it very fine, put the butter into a stewpan, and lay the spinach over that; stir it over a gentle fire, and dredge in the flour.
Add the gravy, and let it boil quickly for a few minutes, that it may not discolour.
When the flavour of SPINACH. nutmeg is liked, grate some to the spinach, and when thoroughly hot, and the gravy has dried away a little, Garnish the dish with sippets of toasted bread. serve.
TIME.-10 to 15 minutes to boil the spinach; 10 minutes to simmer in the gravy. SEASONABLE.
Spring spinach from March to July; winter spinach from October to February. - Note. Spinach dressed by the above recipe may be pressed into a hot mould; it should then be turned out quickly, and served immediately.
The text has come through the scanner shuffled — the phrase "that it may not discolour" appears at the top, and the stray headings "SPINACH-GREEN" and "SPINACH" are index fragments — but the method itself is intact and straightforward: boil, squeeze, chop, finish in butter and gravy.
- "2 pailfuls" of spinachA genuinely loose measure of raw leaf volume rather than a fixed unit, and not worth pretending to convert precisely. A pailful is not a fixed quantity, so any equivalent is guesswork; for eight people as a side, something in the region of 4 lb of untrimmed spinach, cooking down to a fraction of that weight once squeezed, is a reasonable starting point.
- The salt is for the waterTwo tablespoonfuls seasons the boiling pot, not the finished dish. Almost all of it goes down the drain with the cooking water.
- Boiling timeTen to fifteen minutes suits older, coarser leaf; the recipe gives the same time whatever the season. Modern bagged leaf needs one to two minutes in boiling water, or simply wilting in its own moisture, or it turns olive-grey and loses everything worth having.
- Squeeze it genuinely dryThis is the hinge of the recipe. Spinach holds an astonishing amount of water; if it is not pressed hard — between the hands, or in a clean cloth — the butter will not coat it and the gravy will thin into a puddle rather than clinging.
- "Good gravy"Meat gravy or reduced brown stock from the day's roast, not thickened packet gravy. Eight tablespoonfuls is half a cup. The dish is therefore not vegetarian as written; a well-reduced vegetable stock with a little butter will do the same structural job.
- Boil quickly for a few minutesThe instruction is about driving off moisture fast so the green stays bright — long slow simmering is what dulls the colour. Keep the pan wide and the heat high, and stop when the gravy has just tightened around the spinach.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toasted bread, arranged round the edge of the dish. They serve the same purpose as croutons and should go on at the last moment.
- The mould notePressing the hot spinach into a warmed dariole or small basin and turning it straight out gives the neat domed shape Victorian service liked. It only works if the spinach is dry and stiff; wet spinach collapses on the plate.
- CostNinepence for a dish serving eight is a reminder that this was cheap bulk vegetable cookery, made expensive only by the butter and the gravy.
Spinach "dressed in the French mode" here means chopped fine and bound with butter, flour and meat gravy, rather than served as whole drained leaf. The seasonality note reflects the fact that before refrigerated transport spinach came in two distinct crops, a tender spring sowing from March and a tougher overwintering variety standing in the ground from October.