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Spinach a la Mode
Blanch one peck of spinach, cutting off the stocks and washing it well, chop fine, and put into a saucepan with one ounce of butter and a little grated nutmeg. Stir with a wooden spoon, and cook for five minutes, adding one ounce of butter kneaded with two tablespoonfuls of flour, two tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar and one-half pint of milk. Stir often and cook for ten minutes; then serve, garnished with half a dozen sippets of bread fried in butter.
A creamed spinach in the French manner, thickened with kneaded butter rather than a cooked roux. The measurements are period ones and the sugar is not a misprint.
- A peck of spinachA peck is a dry measure of 8 quarts. The equivalent weight of loose spinach leaves is not fixed, and blanched and chopped the leaves reduce to a small fraction of their raw bulk, so scale to the number you are feeding.
- Stalks and washingThe instruction to cut off the stalks and wash well matters more with mature bunched spinach than with bagged baby leaves, which need neither. If you use bunched spinach, wash in several changes of water; sandy grit will not cook out.
- BlanchingThirty to sixty seconds in well-salted boiling water is enough. Drain, cool, and squeeze the water out firmly before chopping, or the finished dish will thin out and refuse to hold the sauce.
- Kneaded butterThe ounce of butter worked with flour is beurre mani\, off a hard boil, or it will lump. The full ten minutes of cooking is needed to lose the raw flour taste.
- MeasuresAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Half a pint of milk is one cup. "Powdered sugar" in 1896 meant granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch; ordinary caster or granulated sugar is the correct substitute.
- The sugarTwo tablespoons is a noticeable sweetness and is deliberate, an old pairing with nutmeg and cream. If it reads as too much, start with one and taste; the dish still needs salt and pepper, which Oscar does not mention.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of crustless white bread fried in butter until crisp, arranged around the edge. Fry them at the last minute; they soften within a few minutes of touching the spinach.
Spinach dressed with butter, cream, nutmeg and a little sugar is an old European treatment that predates the restaurant kitchen by centuries, and it survived into hotel cooking as the standard "creamed spinach" served beside roasts and steaks. The thickening here is kneaded butter rather than a flour-and-butter roux cooked first. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book collects the professional French repertoire of the house alongside American staples; sippets of fried bread as a garnish, common through the nineteenth century, are the detail that dates the dish most clearly. The generous peck of raw spinach is a reminder of how little a large quantity of greens yields once cooked, and of how cheap leaf vegetables were relative to the labor of cleaning them.