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Creamed Spinach in Carrot Cups
1 tablespoonful milk. 1/2 cup grated bread-crumbs. 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls lemon-juice. Chop any cold cooked spinach very fine. Moisten with cream or white sauce No. 2 (see page 68) and heat. Cut medium-sized carrots to form cups and then scrape. Cook in boiling salted water until tender. Fill with the creamed spinach and serve hot.
Spinach Croquettes (with Fish) 1 cup spinach 1 cup cold flaked fish 1 1/2 tablespoonful milk 1 tablespoonful watercress, chopped fine cup grated breadcrumbs 1 tablespoonfuls I lemon-juice Pepper and salt II7 Moisten spinach with milk. Add lemon-juice, cress, and seasoning to fish. Mix all together with bread-crumbs. Form into croquettes, roll in crumbs, then in beaten egg, then in crumbs. Fry in deep fat. Serve with egg sauce (see page 69).
This quantity will make six.
A simple assembly dish from the era when leftover vegetables were expected to reappear at the next meal in a more presentable form. Almost all the work is in the carrots.
- Carving the cupsChoose short, thick carrots rather than long tapering ones, cut them into 1 1/2-inch lengths, and hollow each with a melon baller or a small paring knife, leaving walls about 1/4 inch thick. The recipe shapes first and scrapes afterwards; whatever the reason, it is the easier order, since a peeled carrot is slippery and awkward to hold while cutting.
- Cooking the carrotsBoiling salted water until tender means 10-15 minutes for cups of this thickness. Stop while they still hold their shape; a carrot cooked to full softness will collapse under the filling.
- White sauce No. 2The recipe sends the reader to a numbered sauce on page 68, which is not reproduced here. Many books of the period number their white sauces from thin to thick, so a medium sauce is a fair guess, but the actual proportions should be taken from the sauce chapter rather than assumed. Cream, the alternative given, should be reduced slightly so the spinach does not weep into the carrot.
- Draining the spinachCold cooked spinach holds a great deal of water. Squeeze it hard in a towel before chopping, or the filling will thin out no matter how stiff the sauce.
- SeasoningSalt is called for in the carrots' cooking water but none is specified for the spinach filling. Salt and pepper are wanted, and a grating of nutmeg suits creamed spinach.
- Holding and servingAs a modern convenience, the filled cups can be set in a shallow buttered dish and warmed in a moderate oven (about 350F) for roughly 10 minutes rather than combining two hot components at the last moment. The recipe gives no yield for this dish; two or three cups per person suits it as a side.
Left-over cookery was a recognised genre in English and American kitchens from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s, and its authors worked under a double obligation: nothing was to be wasted, and nothing was to look like a remnant. Hollowing a vegetable into a container for another vegetable answers both demands at once, and belongs to the same impulse that produced tomato cases, potato baskets and scooped cucumbers. Spinach was a natural filling, chopped and creamed. The cross-reference to a numbered white sauce is characteristic of the period as well; a household book of this kind assumed the reader would turn to the sauce chapter, since the same few foundation sauces carried dozens of dishes.