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Spinach à La Reine
½ tablespoon chopped onion
Salt and pepper
½ tablespoon butter
3½ tablespoons grated cheese
1 quart spinach
3 eggs
1 tablespoon flour
6 cooked shrimps
1 cup milk
Cook the onion in the butter or butter substitute, add the spinach, which has been washed and chopped, and fry quickly. Add flour and milk, and cook until it thickens. Season with salt and pepper, add grated cheese, and when it starts to boil remove from the fire and add well-beaten egg-whites, then the beaten yolks, and bake in a very hot oven for ten minutes. Garnish with the shrimps.
A small spinach soufflé baked in a gratin dish rather than a mould, with shrimp as garnish. The ingredient list runs in two columns in the original, which is why it reads as a jumble.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe base is a thick, hot cheese béchamel with spinach in it. Let it cool for a few minutes off the heat before the eggs go in, then fold the whipped whites through in two additions with a light hand. Beating them into a scalding base collapses them and you get a flat green pancake.
- Egg order is invertedThe original adds beaten whites first, then yolks. Standard practice is the reverse — yolks stirred into the warm base, whites folded in last — and it gives a better rise. Either way the whites should be at soft peak, not stiff and dry.
- "A very hot oven"In period usage roughly 450-500°F, though tables vary and some start lower, near 425. Ten minutes at that heat suits a shallow buttered gratin dish; anything deeper will want considerably longer -- check that the centre is just set and trembling.
- A quart of spinachA dry-measure quart of raw chopped leaves, which is only a few ounces of fresh spinach, not a pound; treat it as a couple of generous handfuls. Squeeze out as much water as you can -- wet spinach thins the base and the soufflé will not hold.
- Butter substitutePeriod shorthand for oleomargarine or one of the vegetable shortenings then sold as economies. Butter is fine and better here.
- The cheeseUnspecified, as it usually is in these books. Gruyère or a dry aged Cheddar gives body; Parmesan alone is sharp but works. Three and a half tablespoons grated is a scant ounce.
- The shrimpSix cooked shrimp for the whole dish is decoration, not substance. Warm them briefly and set them on top after baking — reheating in a 450°F oven turns them to rubber.
- YieldServes three as a light main course or four as a first course. It must go to the table straight from the oven; a soufflé this shallow starts to sink within a couple of minutes.
À la reine — "in the queen's style" — was one of the elastic prestige tags of nineteenth-century French menu language, attached to dishes made rich with cream, eggs or a fine white sauce, and often to poultry in particular. By the time it reached an American pattern company's household compendium it signified little more than "the good version, with cheese and shrimp on it." Butterick sold dress patterns and magazines to middle-class households, and the presence of French cookery in such a book tells you what that audience expected of itself: a working knowledge of the soufflé, or at least the ambition of one. The instruction to use "butter or butter substitute" in the same breath, without comment, suggests a moment when oleomargarine was at least unremarkable in some American kitchens — though its standing was contested for decades.