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Spinach in a Mold with Mushrooms
Boil the spinach for a few moments, drain, squeeze out the water, then pound it well, and pass it through a fine colander. Put it into a saucepan with a lump of butter and a few drops of lemon juice. Let it boil for a few moments, then turn it into a dish and allow it to cool. When cold mix with it the beaten-up yolks of two eggs. Put them into a buttered mold, leaving an empty space in the middle. Bake in a slow oven for about an hour. When cooked turn it out onto a dish, and fill up the empty space with mushrooms, which you have prepared as follows: Wash and clean a sufficient quantity of mushrooms and put them into a saucepan with a good-sized lump of butter, a little flour, salt, and pepper. Cook over a brisk fire for ten minutes. Moisten well with chicken broth or stock, and add some roux made as follows: Put one tablespoon of flour and one of butter into a saucepan, and cook until the flour has lost all raw taste. Then add stock or milk as desired, slowly--one cup for every tablespoon of butter or flour--and stir until smooth. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon on the mushrooms, put them with their sauce into the spinach, and serve.
This is a sformato — a savoury vegetable mould bound with egg yolk, baked in a ring and filled at the last moment. The original gives no quantities, so the notes below fill in the gaps.
- The hinge: a ring mould and gentle heatThe "empty space in the middle" means a ring mould (a savarin or tube pan), buttered heavily so the spinach releases cleanly. Yolk-bound pury by rising, so the heat must stay low; "slow oven" is usually reckoned somewhere around 300F, though the recipe gives no figure, and a water bath around the mould is useful insurance against a grainy, weeping centre.
- How much spinachNone is stated. Roughly 3 lb of fresh spinach, or about 2 lb of frozen leaf spinach, thawed, will cook and squeeze down to something like 2 cups of purée, roughly a small ring mould's worth. The two yolks the recipe calls for will bind about that quantity; a larger mould may want a third.
- Squeeze harder than seems reasonableBoil only a minute or two, then wring the spinach in a towel until no more water comes out. Residual liquid is the single most common reason these moulds refuse to turn out.
- Pounding and the "fine colander"A mortar and a sieve; a food processor does the pounding in seconds. The sieving still matters — it removes stalk fibre that would otherwise streak the finished mould. Push the purée through a fine-mesh strainer with a rubber spatula.
- Cooling before the yolksNot optional. Yolks stirred into hot spinach scramble on contact. Cool to lukewarm, then beat them in, and season now — the recipe never salts the spinach.
- TimingAn hour at 300F suits a large mould; a smaller one may set in 35-45 minutes. It is done when a knife inserted near the centre comes out clean and the centre reads about 175F. Let it rest 10 minutes before inverting, or it will slump.
- The mushrooms and the doubled flourThe mushrooms are floured, then a separate roux is added on top of that, so the sauce is thickened twice. Use about 1 lb of mushrooms, skip the flour in the pan, and thicken only with the roux (1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, 1 cup stock) for a sauce that coats rather than pastes. Ten minutes over a brisk fire is right; the mushrooms should give up their water and start to colour.
- Lemon twice overA few drops go into the spinach and the juice of half a lemon into the mushrooms. Add the second lot off the heat, just before filling, so the acid stays bright and does not dull the sauce.
- YieldA first course or light supper for four to six, served hot from the oven; the mould firms as it stands and is unpleasant cold.
Sformato — literally "unmoulded" — was a fixture of the Italian middle-class table in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina (1891) gives a whole run of them, spinach among the most common. The form owes something to the French timbale, and the ring is filled at table with a ragù, sweetbreads or mushrooms: the mould does the structural work, the filling does the flavouring. Simple Italian Cookery appeared in 1912 under the name Antonia Isola, generally identified as Mabel Earl McGinnis, and was apparently aimed at American cooks who wanted Italian food at home; its vegetable chapter leans hard on dishes like this one, which use very little meat and turn a cheap green into something that arrives at the table looking composed.