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Spinach
Pick, wash spinach, put in boiling water and cook until tender. Drain, season with salt, butter and pepper. Put in warm platter. Serve with hard boiled eggs cut in rounds and laid around spinach. Poached eggs are also nice with this vegetable.
A bare-bones method from an era when spinach came in sandy bunches and was boiled in an open pot. A few adjustments bring it closer to how the vegetable is handled now.
- Washing is the hinge"Pick, wash" carries more weight than it looks. Field spinach holds grit in the crown of the leaf; wash in a deep bowl of cold water, lift the leaves out rather than pouring off, and repeat until no sand settles at the bottom.
- Cook until tender, brieflyMature spinach needs two to three minutes in boiling water, baby leaves less than one. The older practice of boiling until thoroughly limp turns the leaves olive-grey and washes out most of the flavour.
- Drain hardSpinach carries an enormous amount of water. Press it in a colander with the back of a spoon, or squeeze it in a towel, before it goes near butter and salt, or the platter will flood.
- QuantityNo amount is given. Raw spinach collapses dramatically in the pot, to something like a tenth of its raw volume; allow roughly 8 oz raw per person as a side dish, which is about one large bunch.
- SeasoningSalt, butter and pepper only, in the plain style of the book. A squeeze of lemon or a grating of nutmeg added at the end is consistent with period practice and lifts the boiled flavour.
- The eggsFor rounds, hard-boil eight to ten minutes and cool in cold water so the yolks stay yellow and the shells slip. For poached, cook three minutes for a soft yolk and drain on a cloth before setting them on the spinach.
- Warm platterWorth honouring. Spinach and butter lose heat fast on cold china; a few minutes in a low oven or under hot water makes the difference between a hot dish and a tepid one.
Spinach boiled, chopped or left whole and served under eggs is old enough that the pairing acquired a shorthand: on French menus à la florentine came to mean anything set on a bed of spinach, a name traditionally linked to Catherine de' Medici's fondness for the vegetable, though the story is repeated far more often than it is documented. Mrs. Wilson was writing for American households in the years around the First World War, when the U.S. Food Administration was pushing vegetables and eggs as substitutes for scarce meat, and a plate of spinach ringed with hard-boiled eggs was exactly the sort of cheap, complete supper dish such campaigns wanted on the table. The terseness of the entry reflects the book's assumption that boiling greens needed no instruction, only a suggestion for what to put beside them.