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Spinach, Creamed
Cook thoroughly washed spinach twenty minutes in salted water; drain well, and chop fine. Return to the fire, add one tablespoon of butter, salt and pepper, and stir until the butter is melted; then add two tablespoons of cream, the finely chopped yolks of two hard boiled eggs, and beat well.
A short, practical spinach dish from the era when green vegetables were boiled into submission. The only real change worth making is the cooking time.
- Twenty minutes is far too longSpinach is tender in two to three minutes in boiling salted water, and wilts in a covered pan in barely more. Twenty minutes destroys the colour and leaves a grey, sulphurous purée. Cook until just collapsed, then drain.
- Quantity is unstatedThe small amounts of butter and cream suggest a modest dish: one tablespoon of butter and two of cream would suit something in the region of a pound of raw spinach, which cooks down to roughly a cup or so. That would serve two to three as a side.
- Drain hard"Drain well" is doing real work here. Press the cooked spinach in a sieve or squeeze it in a towel before chopping, or the butter and cream will slacken into a watery pool rather than coating the leaves.
- WashingThe insistence on "thoroughly washed" reflects field-grown, sandy spinach sold loose. Bunched spinach still needs two or three changes of cold water; bagged washed leaves do not.
- CreamUse heavy or whipping cream. Cream of this period was unhomogenised and its richness varied, but it was generally fattier than modern half-and-half, which is more liable to split when beaten into a hot pan.
- The egg yolksThe hard-boiled yolks are a thickener and a garnish at once, giving body without flour. Push them through a fine sieve rather than chopping for a smoother result, and add them off direct heat so they do not scramble further.
- "Return to the fire"A low burner. The mixture only needs to be warmed through and beaten smooth; it should not simmer once the cream is in.
Creamed spinach belongs to the long American and English habit of dressing boiled greens with butter and dairy, a treatment often compared with épinards à la crème in French household cookery of the nineteenth century, though the connection is a parallel rather than a documented line of descent. The sieved hard-boiled yolk is the older touch: egg yolk was one way to bind and enrich a vegetable purée, and the same trick appears in period recipes for creamed onions and sorrel. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern company's publishing arm, aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns and read The Delineator, and its vegetable chapter seems broadly in keeping with the advice of the day: long boiling, generous salting, and a finish rich enough to make a plain green worth serving at a formal table.