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Spinach in Eggs
Cook spinach in salted water as for ordinary use. While this is cooking boil eggs in shells for twenty minutes. Cut in halves, and remove the yellows. Cut a bit from each end and stand them on a platter. Season the yolks with red pepper, mustard, butter and salt. When thoroughly mixed add enough vinegar to make it like soft mashed potatoes. Drain the spinach dry and season it. Fill the egg-cups high, and put the rest around them. Put the prepared yolks in a ricer, and squeeze over all.
SUCCOTASH-This is made of green corn and Lima beans, although string or butter beans may be used. Cut the corn carefully from the cob, and to each pint allow one pint of Lima beans, one-half pint of cream or milk, one tablespoon of butter, salt and pepper to taste. Cover the beans with boiling water, and cook for thirty minutes. Drain off the water; add the corn and the milk or cream, and stew slowly for fifteen minutes, or longer, if the corn is old; then add the seasoning, and serve. In winter, if dried corn and beans are used, soak both separately over night. In the morning cover the beans with fresh water, and boil them very gently for two hours. Do not drain the water from the corn, but set the pan containing it on the back of the range where it will be well warmed without boiling, while the beans are cooking. When the beans are tender, drain and add them to the corn; both should then have only water enough to about cover them. Cook slowly for twenty minutes, and drain off some water until there is not more than two-thirds of a cup left; then add the milk and seasoning.
Two dishes share this page: a stuffed-egg-and-spinach platter and a plain succotash. The first is a garnish exercise, the second a straightforward stew.
- Twenty minutes is too long for the eggsTwenty minutes in the shell gives a green-grey ring around the yolk and a rubbery white. Ten to twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then a cold-water plunge, gives a firm yolk that still mashes smoothly and peels cleanly.
- "Red pepper" means cayenneIn this period red pepper is ground cayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper. Start with a pinch for six yolks; the vinegar will sharpen it further.
- The egg-cups are the whitesCutting a slice from each end of a halved white lets it stand upright as a cup. Trim only enough to make a flat base, or the filling runs out the bottom.
- Vinegar to the texture of soft mashed potatoThis is the hinge of the dish: the yolk paste has to be soft enough to push through a ricer but stiff enough to hold its thread. Add the vinegar a teaspoon at a time. Plain cider or white wine vinegar suits it better than anything sweetened.
- A ricer, or a sieveThe point is fine strands falling over the spinach. A potato ricer with the coarse plate works; so does pressing the paste through a wire sieve with the back of a spoon.
- Spinach shrinks hardReckon a pound of raw spinach per two servings. "Drain dry" means genuinely dry — press it in a colander or squeeze it in a towel, or the platter floods.
- Succotash proportionsEqual volumes of cut corn and shelled Lima beans, a cup of milk or cream to each quart of vegetables, and a tablespoon of butter. This makes four to six side servings.
- Fresh corn cooks in minutesFresh corn cooks quickly -- modern sweet corn varieties are generally bred for more sugar and tenderness than the sweet corn of the period, so a full fifteen minutes of stewing may taste flat; five to eight minutes after the milk goes in is likely enough. The recipe itself allows the longer time only "if the corn is old."
- The dried versionSoak dried corn and dried beans separately overnight, cook the beans until tender, and keep the corn hot without boiling. "The back of the range" means a low, steady heat — the lowest burner setting or a 200F oven does the same work.
Succotash comes into English from a Narragansett word, usually given as msickquatash, meaning boiled whole kernels of corn; the dish itself is one of the clearest Native American survivals in ordinary American cooking, corn and beans grown together and cooked together. That the book gives both a summer version with green corn and a winter version with dried corn and beans is worth noticing: it is a household book written for kitchens where the two seasons meant genuinely different food, and where dried corn was still a pantry staple rather than a specialty item. The spinach-and-egg dish beside it belongs to a different impulse altogether -- the turn-of-the-century enthusiasm for making plain vegetables look composed on the platter, with riced yolk standing in for the piped garnishes of professional cooking.