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Cream of Spinach
1 pint cream stock 1/2 table,ooon chopped onion Wash the spinach thoroughly; throw it into a dry kettle and place over the fire, stirring until the spinach is wilted. Drain the spinach, saving the water; chop it very fine; return it to the water; add the onion and cook until thoroughly done, adding a little more water if necessary. Mash in the same water; strain and add the juice to the hot cream sauce.
A loose-leaf page that has lost part of its ingredient list in printing: the spinach quantity never appears, and "1/2 table,ooon" is a mangled half tablespoon. The method itself is sound and is essentially a spinach purée let down with a thin béchamel.
- The missing quantityNo weight of spinach is given. For 1 pint of cream stock, count on 1 to 1 1/2 lb of fresh spinach, which cooks down to roughly a cup of purée and gives a soup for four as a first course.
- "Cream stock" and "cream sauce"The recipe uses both terms and appears to mean the same thing: a thin white sauce. No proportions are given here; a conventional one of the period would be roughly a tablespoon each butter and flour to a pint of milk or milk-and-stock. The page does not define it, so a foundation-sauce recipe elsewhere in the collection was presumably intended to supply the detail.
- The dry kettleSpinach is wilted in nothing but the water clinging to its leaves after washing. Do not add water at this stage or you dilute the flavour; a wide pan with a lid and two or three minutes of stirring is enough.
- Save the cooking liquorThe instruction to keep the drained water and return the chopped spinach to it is the hinge of the recipe. Some of the colour and a good deal of the water-soluble flavour goes into that liquid, and it is what the recipe appears to mean by "the juice."
- Cooking the onionHalf a tablespoon of chopped onion is a light touch by modern standards. It needs to be simmered until quite soft before straining, or it will read as raw in a soup this delicate.
- Mashing and strainingA blender and then a fine sieve does in a minute what the original expects of a masher and a strainer. Note that the recipe adds only the strained juice to the sauce; how much of the pulp you force through is left to you, and the more you push the thicker and greener the result.
- Combine off the boilAdd the spinach juice to the hot sauce and serve at once. Boiling the two together turns the bright green a dull olive within a couple of minutes.
- SeasoningNone is specified, which was normal shorthand. Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are what the dish expects.
Cream soups of this kind — a vegetable purée slackened with white sauce — were the backbone of American cookery-school teaching around the turn of the twentieth century, because they demonstrated one technique (the roux-based sauce) that could then be applied to celery, asparagus, corn or spinach in turn. The dry-kettle wilting method, with the cooking water saved rather than poured away, reflects a period conviction that the "juices" of green vegetables carried their nourishment, an idea that predates any measurement of vitamins but happens to hold up reasonably well for water-soluble nutrients.