Spinach Salad
Pick over, wash, and cook one-half peck spinach. Drain, and chop finely. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, and add one tablespoon melted butter. Butter slightly small tin moulds and pack solidly with mixture. Chill, remove from moulds, and arrange on thin slices of cold boiled tongue cut in circular pieces. Garnish base of each with a wreath of parsley, and serve on top of each Sauce Tartare.
A moulded salad from the era when a cold plate was expected to have architecture. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements are volume-based in a way that no longer maps onto how spinach is sold.
- Half a peck of spinachA peck is eight dry quarts, so this is four dry quarts, spinach "picked over" from the stems. Old market weights for a peck of spinach vary a good deal, so treat the modern equivalent as approximate: somewhere around 2 lb as bought, or three to four large supermarket bags, which should cook down to roughly the two cups packed that the moulds need.
- Squeeze it dryThis is the hinge. Chopped cooked spinach holds an astonishing amount of water, and wet spinach will not hold a mould shape or take a seasoning. Press it hard in a sieve or wring it in a towel before chopping and dressing.
- Cooking the spinachThe original says only "cook," leaving both method and time open. Two or three minutes in boiling salted water, or wilting it in its own washing water, gives better colour and flavour; the finished salad is served cold either way.
- The moulds"Small tin moulds" points to individual timbale or dariole moulds; sizes varied, but something in the region of a third of a cup suits the dish. Small ramekins, teacups, or a 1/3-cup dry measure all work. Butter them lightly, pack the spinach in very firmly, and chill at least an hour so the butter sets and holds the shape.
- Cold boiled tongueWhole beef tongue, simmered, peeled, pressed and chilled — still sold at butchers and Latin and kosher markets, though rarely at a supermarket. Cut the slices thin and stamp them into rounds slightly wider than the base of your moulds. Sliced ham, corned beef or roast beef substitute perfectly well for the look and the salt.
- Sauce TartareIn this book that means mayonnaise with chopped capers, olives, pickles and herbs — not the sweetened commercial tartar sauce. If you make the mayonnaise from scratch it contains raw yolk; use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, and keep the assembled plates cold.
- Yield and servingDepending on how much your spinach cooks down and how large your moulds are, expect somewhere around half a dozen. Serve one per person as a first course or as part of a cold luncheon spread; the parsley wreath and the spoonful of sauce on top are the whole point of the presentation.
Moulded vegetable salads like this one belong to the American "salad course" of the 1890s and 1900s, when a salad was judged as much on its shape and its garnish as on its taste, and when a cook's competence was demonstrated by turning something soft out of a tin cleanly. Cold boiled tongue was an unremarkable staple of the period larder and cold in a form often said to have been sold ready to slice cheap, and a standard component of cold suppers and picnic baskets in a way it has not been in American kitchens for several generations. Books of the period give a great many of these composed cold plates, and their logic is economy dressed as elegance: leftover tongue, a bunch of spinach, and a spoonful of mayonnaise assembled into something that looked like it came from a hotel kitchen.