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Spinach
There are several varieties of spinach (sometimes spelled spinage) cultivated in this country, the chief of which are the summer and winter kinds; the former is known as the round-seeded or summer spinach, and the latter as the prickly or winter spinach. The leaves are fleshy and succulent, and when thoroughly washed by passing through several lots of fresh water, they may be cooked or prepared according to the following recipes. The juice of the leaves is used to color confectionery.
Blanch a peck of well-washed spinach and drain it; put it into a saucepan with one-half breakfast cupful of veal stock, and cook for ten minutes. When ready to serve, add one ounce of butter, melt well together, and serve with croutons of fried bread.
Oscar buries a short recipe at the end of a seed-catalogue paragraph: blanched spinach finished in veal stock and butter, served with fried bread. The instructions assume a professional larder and a hotel-sized pan.
- Wash it like he saysThe one instruction that matters is the repeated changes of water. Spinach grows in sand and grit clings inside the crumpled leaves; lift the leaves out of the water rather than pouring the whole lot through a colander, or the sand goes back on top of them.
- A peckA peck is eight dry quarts. For leafy spinach that measure is genuinely loose, since packing changes the weight enormously; period produce tables put a peck of spinach anywhere from a couple of pounds up to about five. Judge by volume of raw leaves rather than by a fixed weight, and scale the stock and butter to whatever quantity you actually cook.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, usually reckoned at about 8 to 10 fluid ounces; half of one is roughly 1/2 cup, give or take. Ordinary chicken stock stands in for veal stock without much loss, though it will taste less neutral.
- Ten minutes is too longAlready-blanched spinach needs only two or three minutes in the stock to heat through. Ten minutes turns it olive-drab and washes out what flavour survived the blanching.
- Drain hardPress the blanched spinach in a sieve or twist it in a towel before it goes into the pan. Water carried over will thin the stock and leave the butter refusing to bind at the end.
- The butter finishAn ounce of butter is two tablespoons. Take the pan off direct heat and swirl it in so it emulsifies into the stock rather than splitting into a greasy pool.
- CroutonsThese are triangles or dice of white bread fried in butter or clarified fat, not packaged salad croutons. Fry them at the last minute; they soften quickly against wet spinach.
- The colouring noteThe green juice Oscar mentions was pressed from raw leaves and gently heated to set the chlorophyll into a paste. It is a period technique, not part of this dish.
Spinach reached western Europe by way of Persia and Moorish Spain, and by the nineteenth century American seedsmen were selling exactly the two strains Oscar names: round-seeded summer spinach and the hardier prickly-seeded sort sown in autumn to be cut in spring. That seasonal split explains why a hotel could put spinach on the menu most of the year, and why a book aimed at the Waldorf kitchen opens with varieties before it gets to the pan. The finish here — a little stock, a lump of butter off the heat, fried bread around the edge — is standard French service of the period applied to a plain green vegetable, and the veal stock is a sign of a kitchen that had gallons of it standing by rather than a household that would have to make some.} .