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Boiled Spinach
Remove roots, carefully pick over (discarding wilted leaves), and wash in several waters to be sure that it is free from all sand. When young and tender put in a stewpan, allow to heat gradually, and boil twenty-five minutes, or until tender, in its own juices. Old spinach is better cooked in boiling salted water, allowing two quarts water to one peck spinach. Drain thoroughly, chop finely, reheat, and season with butter, salt, and pepper. Mound on a serving dish and garnish with slices of "hard-boiled" eggs and toast points. The green color of spinach is better retained by cooking in an uncovered vessel, in a large quantity of water to which has been added one-third teaspoon soda.
Spinach à la Béchamel Prepare one-half peck Boiled Spinach. Put three tablespoons butter in hot omelet pan; when melted, add chopped spinach, cook three minutes. Sprinkle with two tablespoons flour, stir thoroughly, and add gradually three-fourths cup milk; cook five minutes.
Purée of Spinach Wash and pick over one-half peck spinach, Cook in an uncovered vessel with a large quantity of boiling salted water to which is added one-third teaspoon soda and onehalf teaspoon sugar. Drain, chop finely, and rub through a sieve. Reheat, add three tablespoons butter, one tablespoon flour, and one-half cup cream. Arrange on serving dish and garnish with yolk and white of "hard-boiled" egg and fried bread cut in fancy shapes.
Spinach (French Style) Pick over and wash one peck spinach, and cook in boiling salted water twenty-five minutes. Drain, and finely chop. Reheat in hot pan with four tablespoons butter to which have been added three tablespoons flour and two-thirds cup Chicken Stock. Season with one teaspoon powdered sugar, salt, pepper, and a few gratings each of nutmeg and lemon rind.
Fannie Farmer's spinach chapter is sound on washing and hopeless on timing. Read the first line, ignore the twenty-five minutes, and the three variations that follow are all still worth cooking.
- The timing is the whole problemSpinach is tender in a few minutes, whether wilted in its own moisture or dropped into boiling water. Twenty-five minutes yields a drab, overcooked pulp. Times of this length suit coarse, thick-stemmed mature spinach rather than the young leaf in a supermarket bag -- though note that Farmer applies the twenty-five minutes to young and tender spinach too.
- A peckA dry measure of eight quarts. Standard produce tables put a bushel of spinach at around eighteen to twenty pounds, so a peck runs roughly 4 to 5 lb and a half peck about 2 to 2.5 lb raw, cooking down to a couple of cups chopped. Weigh rather than measure by volume.
- Skip the sodaOne-third teaspoon of baking soda in the water does hold the green, but it softens cell walls to mush and destroys most of the vitamin C. A large volume of hard-boiling salted water, uncovered, for a minute or two gets nearly the same colour with none of the damage.
- Washing still appliesThis is the part of the recipe that has not dated. Bunched spinach carries grit in the crown; lift it out of the water rather than pouring water off it, and repeat until the bottom of the bowl is clean. Bagged, triple-washed leaf can go straight in the pan.
- "Hot omelet pan"Simply a shallow, wide, well-seasoned pan with sloping sides. Any 10-inch skillet does. The point is a large surface so the wet spinach drives off steam quickly instead of stewing.
- Squeeze before saucingFor the Béchamel and French versions especially, wring the drained spinach hard in a towel. Three tablespoons butter and two of flour will not thicken anything if the spinach is still carrying water.
- Purée of spinachA tablespoon of flour with three of butter and a half cup cream is a loose binding, not a proper roux; cook the flour into the butter for a minute before the spinach goes back in or it will taste raw. A blender replaces the sieve entirely.
- YieldA peck as written will serve roughly six to ten as a side depending on how loosely it is packed; the half-peck variations serve three or four.
Boiled spinach dressed with butter and garnished with hard-boiled egg is one of the oldest continuous vegetable preparations in English and French cookery, and the egg garnish is old enough that à la florentine — spinach under eggs or fish — is often said, on the strength of the Catherine de' Medici legend rather than documented history, to have come from Italian cooks in Renaissance France. What dates this page is the confidence about soda. Adding alkali to green vegetable water to fix the colour was standard professional practice through the nineteenth century and appears in Farmer without apology; the nutritional objection, that alkali destroys ascorbic acid, only became common knowledge as vitamin chemistry developed in the first decades of the twentieth century, after the 1896 edition went to press. The three named variations also show the book doing what it was built to do: teach a Boston housekeeper the French repertoire in graded steps, from plain buttered spinach to a béchamel to a purée finished with cream, with the stock, sugar, nutmeg and lemon rind belonging to Spinach (French Style).