Vegetable Loaf

The text has come through the scanner scrambled — two contributors' entries have collided, and the white sauce ingredients ended up in parentheses in the middle of the vegetable list. The dish underneath is legible enough: seasoned spinach, rice and green pepper bound with a medium white sauce and baked.

• Reading the garbled lineThe workable ingredient list is 3/4 can spinach, 3 cups boiled rice, 1 sliced green pepper, and 2 cups white sauce made from 1 1/2 cups milk, 3 tablespoons flour and 3 tablespoons butter, plus salt. The parenthetical is the sauce formula, not a second set of vegetables.
• The white sauce is thicker than it looksThe white sauce -- Three tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1 1/2 cups milk is the standard medium white sauce, and 1 1/2 cups of liquid will not quite make up the stated 2 cups. Cook the roux a full minute before adding the milk; the sauce should be thick enough to hold the loaf together when sliced.
• Canned spinachCan sizes varied; a common early-twentieth-century can of spinach held somewhere in the region of a pound to twenty ounces, so three-quarters of one gives perhaps a cup or so of drained leaf. Frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed hard, is the closest modern substitute. Wet spinach is a likely reason a loaf like this collapses.
• Oven temperatureNone is given. A bound rice loaf with everything already cooked wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the stated 20 minutes — long enough to set and brown lightly, since nothing here needs cooking through.
• The green pepperSliced raw pepper stays crisp and weeps in only 20 minutes. Soften it in a little of the butter first, then dice rather than slice so the loaf cuts cleanly.
• Salt and seasoningCanned spinach and a flour-thickened milk sauce are both bland; the recipe's bare "salt" needs help. Nutmeg, pepper and a handful of grated cheese are period-appropriate and make the difference.
• Pan and yieldThis fills a standard 8x4 loaf pan or a small baking dish and serves four as a main course, six as a side. Grease the pan well and let the loaf stand ten minutes before turning out, or slice it in the dish.