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Spinach Salad
One-half peck spinach, one tablespoonful of butter, half a teaspoonful of salt, speck of pepper, cold tongue or lettuce, parsley, French dressing. Take the leaves from the spinach. Wash it in several waters, put it in a kettle without any water and cook from ten to twenty minutes, or until the spinach is tender. Drain and chop fine. Add the melted butter, salt and pepper. Press into moulds and chill. Serve on thin slices of cold tongue or on lettuce leaves, moisten with a French dressing, and garnish with parsley.
A moulded spinach salad of the sort that filled American salad books around 1900. Two things need attention: the quantity, which is given in a dry measure nobody uses for greens any more, and the cooking time, which belongs to an era before anyone worried about overcooked spinach.
- Half a peck of spinachA peck is 8 dry quarts, so this is 4 quarts of loose leaves — genuinely ambiguous by weight, since it depends entirely on how the leaves pack; market weights for spinach suggest somewhere between about 1½ and 3 lb untrimmed. Cooked and chopped, that comes down to a cup or two.
- Ten to twenty minutes is far too longSpinach wilted in the water clinging to its leaves is done in two or three minutes, and holds its colour. Twenty minutes gives you olive-drab pulp. Cook only until the leaves collapse and turn glossy.
- KettleAny wide pot with a lid. The point of the instruction is that no water is added — the wash water on the leaves is enough steam.
- Drain hardThis is the hinge. A moulded salad will not hold or unmould if the spinach is wet, and the dressing will slide off a weeping mould. Press the chopped spinach in a sieve or twist it in a cloth until no more liquid comes out.
- MouldsSmall ramekins, teacups or a muffin tin, lightly oiled. An hour in the refrigerator sets them firmly enough to turn out.
- Cold tongueBoiled beef tongue, sliced thin, was a standard cold cut in this period and is now a specialist purchase. Any thinly sliced cold roast beef works in the same role, or take the recipe's own alternative and use lettuce.
- French dressingIn a book of this date this means plain oil and vinegar with salt and pepper — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- YieldFour to six small moulds, served as a first course or a side salad.
Moulded vegetable salads were a signature of the American salad craze that ran from the 1890s through the 1920s, when cooks were often praised for turning cooked vegetables into neat, cold, geometric shapes. Spinach took particularly well to the treatment because it packs densely once chopped and needs no gelatine to hold a shape. The cold tongue underneath is the period detail: it appears constantly in salad and luncheon books of the era as a base for cold dishes. Compact single-subject collections like this one were a popular publishing format at the turn of the century, aimed at housekeepers looking to vary a cold luncheon table without much equipment.