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Spinach-and-Tongue Salad
¼ a peck of spinach.
INGREDIENTS.
1 tablespoonful of lemon juice. ¼ a teaspoonful of salt.
A dash of paprica.
1 tablespoonful of oil or butter.
Slices of cold tongue.
Sauce tartare.
Method. - Cook the spinach in salted boiling water until tender; drain, and chop very fine, and season with salt, pepper, oil and lemon juice.
Press into small, well-buttered moulds or cups.
Have ready thin, round slices of cold boiled or braised tongue, the slices a trifle larger than the cups of spinach. When the spinach is cold turn it from the moulds on to the rounds of tongue, and press a star of sauce tartare on the top of each mould. Garnish with parsley and slices of lemon.
A cold composed salad built on moulded spinach and sliced tongue. The instructions are sound; the measurements are the part that needs translating.
- A quarter peck of spinachA peck is 8 dry quarts; a quarter peck is 2 quarts of loose leaves, perhaps 10 oz to 1 lb as bought with stalks. That cooks down to roughly a cup of chopped spinach, enough for about four small moulds.
- Squeeze it dryThis is the hinge. Spinach that is merely drained will weep in the mould and slump when turned out. Press it hard in a sieve or wring it in a towel before chopping, then chop finer than seems necessary so it packs.
- Cooking timeModern spinach is young and tender; 1 to 2 minutes in boiling salted water is plenty, and it should go straight into cold water to hold its colour. The long boil implied by "until tender" was for older, coarser market bunches.
- PapricaSimply paprika, and at this period that meant the mild sweet Hungarian sort, used as much for colour as heat. Smoked paprika would pull the dish somewhere it was never meant to go.
- Oil or butterButter must be melted and worked in while the spinach is warm, or it will seize into flecks. A tablespoon of oil gives a softer set; butter gives a firmer mould once chilled. The cups are buttered simply so the spinach turns out cleanly.
- The mouldsSmall teacups, dariole moulds, or ramekins of about 1/3 cup. Butter them, pack the spinach in firmly, and chill at least an hour before turning out.
- Cold tongueTongue, usually beef, boiled or braised and then cooled; period cooks often pressed it. Most supermarkets will not stock it; a butcher will, and it needs several hours of simmering and peeling before it can be sliced. Sliced ham or rare roast beef stands in for the round base if tongue is out of reach.
- Sauce tartareA mayonnaise-based sauce with capers, gherkins and herbs. To pipe a "star" it must be stiff, so use a thick homemade mayonnaise and drain the pickles well; commercial tartar sauce is generally too loose to hold a shape.
- YieldFour servings as a first course or luncheon salad. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep cold.
Moulded vegetables were central to the cold-luncheon style of the turn of the century: a puree pressed into a cup and turned out gave a homely ingredient like spinach a shape and a silhouette, which mattered more than novelty of flavour. Tongue appears here because it was a thoroughly ordinary cold meat of the period, cheap, sold cured or fresh by butchers, and prized for slicing cleanly into neat rounds once boiled and pressed under a weight. The pairing of spinach with tongue and a piped star of tartare sauce shows the era's borrowed French vocabulary applied to plain Anglo-American materials, and its assumption that the cold larder held a cooked joint waiting to be carved.