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Spinach
Look over the spinach, wash in four waters and take off stalks, boil in a sauce-pan without water for thirty minutes, covering closely, drain in a colander and cut with a knife while draining; season with pepper, salt and a little butter, boil two eggs hard and slice over the top; serve hot. Or it may, when boiled soft, be rubbed through the colander, then put in frying-pan, with a lump of butter, seasoned with pepper and salt. When hot, beat in two or three table-spoons rich cream. Put thin slices of buttered toast (one for each person) on dish and on each piece put a cupful of spinach neatly smoothed in shape, with the half of a hard-boiled egg on the top, cut part uppermost.
A sound nineteenth-century treatment of spinach, with one instruction that modern cooks should ignore outright and one that is better than its reputation.
- Thirty minutes is the thing to changeSpinach wilts in the pan in two to four minutes and turns olive-drab and metallic-tasting well before thirty. Cook it covered only until it collapses, then drain. The long time in the original assumes tough, mature, field-grown leaves with thick midribs, not bagged baby spinach.
- Boiling "without water"This is correct and worth keeping. Spinach carries enough water on its leaves after washing to steam itself in a covered pan. Use a wide heavy pan over moderate heat and do not add liquid.
- Four watersNot an exaggeration for older spinach, which grows low and holds grit in the crown. Wash in a large bowl of cold water, lift the leaves out rather than pouring off, and repeat until no sand settles at the bottom. Pre-washed spinach needs one rinse at most.
- StalksRemoving the stalks matters with large-leaf spinach, where the stems stay fibrous. On young leaves the stems cook in the same time as the leaf and can stay.
- QuantityThe book gives no amount. Spinach loses a great deal of its bulk in cooking, so reckon roughly 1/2 lb raw per person for either version.
- The purée versionRubbing through a colander gives a coarse purée; a food mill or a few pulses in a processor does the same work. Drain hard first, or the cream will not thicken and the toast will go to pulp.
- Hard-boiled eggsTwelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk without the grey ring and sulphur smell that longer boiling produces.
- Serving the toast dishAssemble at the last moment. Butter the toast to the edges so it resists the moisture in the spinach, and serve immediately; it does not hold.
Spinach on buttered toast under a halved hard-boiled egg is the standard genteel American presentation of the vegetable in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it appears in cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s in something close to this form. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) was one of the large compiled household volumes of the period, assembled from contributed and reprinted receipts, and its entry offers two methods in one paragraph rather than choosing. The insistence on four washings is a reminder that spinach then came from a garden or a market cart, cut with soil still on it, and that grit was the chief complaint against the dish.