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Spinach Salad
Place one pint of minced, cold boiled spinach on a dish. Chop separately with a silver knife (steel discolors) the whites and yolks of two hard boiled eggs and arrange them, mixed, in little mounds on the spinach; now pour over the salad a good French dressing. This salad may be served with roast meat or game.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and it stands or falls on how dry the spinach is before it meets the dressing.
- Squeeze the spinach hardBoiled spinach holds an astonishing amount of water, and any that remains will thin the dressing into a grey puddle. Press it in a sieve or wring it in a towel before mincing, then chop it fine so it holds a shape on the dish.
- How much raw spinachA pint of minced cooked spinach is about two cups packed, which takes roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of raw leaf. Serves four as a side.
- The silver knifeThe warning is real but obsolete. Carbon-steel blades of the period reacted with the acids in spinach and left dark streaks; stainless steel, which was not yet in general domestic use when this book was written, does nothing of the kind.
- Hard boiled eggsTen to twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives set yolks without the green-grey ring. Separate whites from yolks while chopping so the two colours stay distinct, then combine as directed.
- French dressing of the periodNot the sweet orange bottled kind. It usually means something in the region of three parts oil to one part vinegar, whisked with salt and pepper, and nothing else unless you want a little mustard. Dress at the table, not in advance.
- Season the spinach itselfThe original relies entirely on the dressing for salt. Boiled spinach that has been wrung dry is flat on its own, so taste and season the base before you build the mounds.
- ServingIntended as an accompaniment to roast meat or game, at room temperature or lightly chilled. It is a plated arrangement, so build it on a flat dish rather than in a bowl.
Cold cooked vegetables dressed with oil and vinegar were a standard part of the late nineteenth-century salad repertoire, well before leafy green salads became the default; a cook of the period was as likely to serve dressed beets, string beans or asparagus as lettuce. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in that spirit of general household instruction, and the recipe's fussiness about a silver knife is a small period tell: carbon-steel cutlery discoloured on contact with acidic and iron-rich foods, and cookery writers of the era are said to have warned against it for spinach, apples and artichokes. The scattering of sieved or chopped hard-boiled egg over a green base is sometimes, if loosely, traced to the French garnish à la polonaise, which classically involves buttered crumbs as well as egg, and it appears throughout Anglo-American cookery of the period as an inexpensive way to make a plain vegetable look composed.