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Minced Spinach
Boil the spinach in plenty of salted water. When cooked, drain off all the water, chop the spinach very fine and season well with salt and pepper. For each pint of minced spinach put one tablespoonful of butter and one-half tablespoonful of flour into a saucepan and stir it over the fire until smooth and cooked. Put the spinach in with the cooked flour before it has become brown, adding for each pint one-half teacupful of milk and stirring it for a few minutes longer. Put the spinach into a basin, then turn it out in shape onto a hot dish. Put a circle of hard-boiled eggs on the top of the spinach and another circle of sliced eggs at the bottom, and serve.
A plain creamed spinach, bound with a small white roux and moulded for the table. Two things decide the result: how dry you get the spinach, and keeping the roux pale.
- Don't brown the rouxThe instruction to add the spinach "before it has become brown" is the hinge. A blond roux keeps the dish green and clean-tasting; even a light tan turns it muddy and nutty in a way that fights the spinach.
- How much spinachA pint of cooked, finely chopped spinach takes roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of raw leaf, or three 10-oz bags. Fresh bunch spinach with stems trimmed is closest to what the kitchen would have used.
- Cooking time"Boil in plenty of salted water" is given without a time, and period boiling was probably longer than we would use. Modern practice is 1 to 2 minutes at a hard boil, or simply wilting it in the water clinging to the washed leaves, then draining. Longer boiling costs colour and flavour and gains nothing.
- Drain hard"Drain off all the water" is understated. Press the spinach in a sieve or wring it in a towel until it stops dripping, or the milk and butter cannot bind it and the mould will collapse into a puddle.
- Half a teacupfulPeriod teacups are variously reckoned at anywhere from 4 to 6 fl oz, so half is somewhere around 1/4 to 1/3 cup; the measure is genuinely loose. Add it gradually and stop when the spinach holds its shape on a spoon.
- Turning it outThe basin is a plain pudding bowl used as a mould. Butter it, pack the hot spinach in firmly, let it sit half a minute, then invert onto the warmed dish. It only works if the spinach is thick enough to hold an edge.
- The eggsThe recipe distinguishes only whole hard-boiled eggs above from sliced rounds below; how the top eggs are cut is left to you. Three or four eggs is enough for a pint of spinach; cook them 9 to 10 minutes and cool them promptly to avoid the grey ring.
- YieldA pint of finished spinach serves four as a side dish, or two if the eggs are meant to carry it as a light supper.
Spinach cooked, chopped, bound with butter and cream and ringed with hard-boiled eggs is the standard nineteenth-century service of the vegetable in French and Anglo-American kitchens alike, close kin to épinards à la crème; the eggs are as much structural garnish as food, giving colour against the dark green and turning a side dish into something presentable on a table where vegetables were expected to be moulded and shaped rather than heaped. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, published his collection in 1896, three years after the hotel opened, and the book records the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen rather than novelties -- which is why an unremarkable spinach preparation sits in it alongside more elaborate dishes. The moulding in a basin and the two circles of egg are the whole point of the entry: the technique is ordinary, the presentation is what the establishment was selling.