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Pepper (Wash pick over and cook)
Wash, pick over, and cook spinach thirty minutes in boiling water to which has been added one-fourth teaspoon powdered sugar and one-eighth teaspoon of soda; drain, chop, and rub through sieve; add stock, heat to boiling-point, bind, add milk, and season with salt and pepper.
This is the tail end of a cream-of-spinach soup, printed in the terse shorthand Farmer used once a method had already been established earlier in the chapter. It assumes you know the book's standard cream-soup proportions, so the quantities have to be supplied from outside the text.
- No quantities are givenThe original names neither the weight of spinach nor the volume of stock and milk; the proportions have to be borrowed from the book's other cream soups, which run to roughly a quart of liquid split between stock and milk. Something like a pound of raw spinach will reduce to about a cup of purée, which suits that volume.
- "Bind" means thickenBinding a soup here means a butter-and-flour roux, cooked together and whisked into the hot stock; the book's cream-soup proportions run to roughly two to three tablespoons of each per quart of liquid. Add the milk after the soup has thickened, as the recipe directs.
- Thirty minutes is far too longSpinach is tender in three to five minutes in boiling water. Half an hour was standard when vegetables were cooked to submission, but it destroys the colour and most of the flavour along with the vitamin C. Blanch briefly, shock in cold water, then purée.
- The sodaAn eighth teaspoon of baking soda in the cooking water keeps the green bright by countering acidity. It also softens the leaf to mush and gives a faintly soapy taste at anything above a trace. Modern practice is to skip it and rely on a hard boil in plenty of unlidded water instead.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a sieve was the usual way to get a smooth purée in 1896. A blender does it in seconds, though passing the result through a fine strainer afterwards still catches the stringy stems.
- SeasoningSpinach purée thinned with milk is bland; it wants more salt than seems reasonable, a good grating of nutmeg, and a squeeze of lemon at the end to lift it. Season after the milk goes in, since the dairy dulls salt.
- Do not boil after the milkOnce the milk is in, hold the soup below a simmer; a hard boil can curdle it, and the reheated purée turns olive.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published in 1896 under Fannie Merritt Farmer's name, devotes a long stretch of its soup chapter to purées of single vegetables — asparagus, celery, pea, spinach — all built on the same frame: cook the vegetable, sieve it, extend it with stock and milk, thicken with a butter-and-flour roux. This was the domestic-science approach in miniature, a method learned once and applied to a dozen ingredients, and it explains why this entry is only a single sentence long. The pinch of soda is a period fixture: cooks had long noticed that alkaline water held the green of chlorophyll, and the practice was current in household cookery of the period, before nutritionists established how thoroughly it strips water-soluble vitamins. The quarter teaspoon of powdered sugar the recipe calls for goes unexplained.