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Spinach (Clean and wash the spinach)
Clean and wash the spinach, carefully removing roots; place in kettle and add half as much boiling water as spinach; salt and boil slowly ten minutes. Place in cooker three hours; drain; add butter, salt and pepper.
Serve with vinegar and hard-boiled eggs.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe: the food is brought to a hard boil on the stove, then sealed into an insulated box packed with hay, felt or soapstone to finish on retained heat. The method makes sense for beans and pot roasts; for spinach it produces something very different from what a modern cook expects.
- What the cooker wasA fireless cooker was an insulated wooden or metal chest, sometimes with preheated soapstone discs, that kept a boiling kettle hot for hours without further fuel. Any heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels inside a cooler will approximate it, as will a slow cooker on low.
- The three hours is the problemSpinach is tender in two to four minutes. Ten minutes of boiling plus three hours of retained heat gives you olive-drab, strongly flavored pulp. If you want the dish as written, expect that texture; if you want green spinach, wilt it in the water clinging to the leaves and stop.
- Water quantity"Half as much boiling water as spinach" is measured by volume of raw leaves, which are mostly air. In practice this is a generous amount of water; spinach releases so much of its own that modern practice uses almost none.
- Washing matters more than it soundsPre-bagged spinach aside, bunched spinach with roots attached carries fine grit that clings in the crumpled leaf. Three changes of cold water, lifting the leaves out each time rather than pouring off, is the old standard and still the right one.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no yield. Reckon a pound of raw spinach per two people as a side dish; it collapses to roughly a cup and a half cooked.
- The vinegar and eggCider or malt vinegar passed at the table, with hard-boiled eggs chopped or quartered over the top, was a common American way of serving boiled greens. The acid cuts the mineral, slightly chalky edge that long-cooked spinach develops.
- PansSpinach is high in oxalic acid, which reacts with bare aluminum and cast iron to give a metallic taste and gray color. Use stainless or enameled ware.
Fireless cookery was a fuel-economy movement more than a culinary one. Insulated cookers, sold commercially in the United States from the first decade of the twentieth century and widely home-built from packing crates and hay, let a housewife bring a pot to the boil in the morning and leave it to finish while the stove went cold, which mattered when the kitchen range burned coal or wood and heated the house in July whether you wanted it to or not. Home economists of the period promoted them hard, and cook books like this one carried whole sections of adapted recipes. The adaptations worked better for some foods than others: dried beans, cereals, tough cuts and stews genuinely benefit from hours of gentle heat, while quick-cooking green vegetables sit less comfortably in the method. Serving greens with vinegar and hard-boiled egg is older than the cooker by a long way and is generally traced to the English and northern European habit of dressing boiled or wilted greens with something sharp.