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Spinach with Cream
Pick and wash the spinach well, boiling it in plenty of salted water; when tender, drain and put it in cold water for a few minutes. Press all the moisture out of the spinach and put it into a saucepan with a little butter and stir over the fire until dry. Dredge a little flour over the spinach, pour in one-fourth pint of boiling cream and season with a little grated nutmeg, sugar and salt. Turn it onto a hot dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve.
A classic creamed spinach in the French manner, written for a cook who already knows the quantities. The instructions are sound; what is missing is scale.
- Quantities are not givenOscar assumes you know how much spinach to buy. Fresh spinach loses roughly nine-tenths of its bulk: 2 to 2 1/2 lb of untrimmed leaf cooks down to about 2 cups pressed, which serves four alongside the quarter pint of cream.
- One-fourth pint of creamIn an American book of 1896 that is 1/2 cup. If you are working from British measure it is 5 fl oz. Use heavy or whipping cream; it is added boiling so it thickens on contact with the dredged flour.
- Boil the spinach briefly"Until tender" meant something longer in a period that distrusted underdone vegetables. Modern flat-leaf or bagged spinach is tender in 1 to 2 minutes in plenty of salted water; older bunched savoy leaf may take 3 to 4. Past that it turns olive-drab and loses its flavour.
- The cold water is not optionalPlunging the drained spinach into cold water sets the colour and stops the carryover cooking. Ice water works better than tap. Skip it and the finished dish will be noticeably duller in colour.
- Press it genuinely dryThis is the hinge. Squeeze the blanched spinach hard in a towel or against a sieve, then keep stirring in the butter until no more moisture steams off. Any water left behind will thin the cream sauce into a puddle at the edge of the dish.
- Dredging the flour"Dredge a little" means sift about 1 to 2 teaspoons evenly over the hot buttered spinach and stir it in for a minute before the cream goes in, so the flour cooks rather than tasting raw. It is a rough roux made in place.
- ChoppingOscar does not say whether to chop the spinach or leave the leaves whole. If you want the smooth creamed spinach most people expect now, chop it fine on a board after pressing, before it goes into the butter.
- Seasoning and croutonsThe sugar is a pinch, not a sweetener; it counters the mineral edge of the spinach, and the nutmeg should be barely detectable. The croutons are small triangles or dice of bread fried in butter, set around the dish at the last moment so they stay crisp.
Spinach with cream and nutmeg is French kitchen practice, épinards à la crème, and it arrived in American hotel dining rooms with the French-trained brigades that ran them. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and his 1896 Cook Book reads like a working record of what that kitchen sent out: hundreds of short, unmeasured entries that presume a professional at the range who needs the sequence, not the arithmetic. The pairing of spinach with nutmeg is old enough in European cookery to be automatic, and the fried-bread croutons are the standard nineteenth-century garnish for any soft, moist vegetable purée, supplying the crunch the dish cannot supply itself. That the recipe survives with no weights at all is itself the period detail.