No. 1771

Bacon—Smoked—with Spinach, English Style

Petit Sale Fume aux Epinards a l'Anglaise

Cut from a side of smoked bacon some pieces weighing about a pound each; boil them in unsalted water. Clean some spinach, cook it in separate salted water, drain but do not chop. Put it into a sautoir with a piece of butter divided in small pats, and when prepared to serve place it in the center of a dish, remove the rind from the bacon, cut it in slices, and lay them overlapping one another on top of the spinach.

← No. 1770 Whole Lamb a la Theodora—Hot and Cold Pork No. 1772 Black Blood Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's shorthand assumes a professional larder: a slab of smoked bacon, a bushel of spinach and a cook who knows how long a pound of cured pork takes. The two things worth getting right are the water and the spinach volume.

What the bacon isPetit salé fumé means a piece of cured, smoked pork belly or shoulder cut from the slab, not breakfast rashers. Ask a butcher for an uncut piece of smoked slab bacon, or use an unsliced smoked gammon/pork belly of about 1 lb per piece.
Unsalted water, and whyThe instruction is not a stylistic flourish. The cure is already heavy, and boiling in salted water gives an unpleasantly salty result. Some modern commercial bacon is saltier still; a cold-water soak of an hour or two, or a change of water partway through cooking, is a reasonable modern adjustment, though the recipe itself says nothing of either.
Simmer, do not boilRanhofer says simply 'boil,' but a bare shiver serves better: a 1 lb piece needs roughly 45 to 60 minutes, depending on thickness, until a skewer slides in with no resistance. A hard rolling boil tightens the meat and drives out fat, leaving dry slices that will not hold together when carved.
Spinach quantityThe recipe gives no quantity. Raw leaf spinach collapses to a small fraction of its raw volume, so for four people as a bed for the bacon, reckon on something like 2 to 3 lb of loose leaf spinach. Bagged baby spinach works but gives a looser, wetter result than mature leaf.
SautoirA wide, straight-sided shallow pan. The point is surface area: the drained spinach is turned over heat with the butter added in small pats so it emulsifies into the leaf rather than pooling.
"Drain but do not chop"This is épinards en branches, whole-leaf spinach, as against the sieved purée served elsewhere in the book. Press the leaves gently in a colander or against the side of the pan to shed water, but do not wring them dry or they turn to string.
ButterNothing else seasons this dish; the recipe says only 'a piece of butter divided in small pats.' Something like 3 to 4 tablespoons for 2 lb of cooked spinach, added off a fierce heat and swirled in so it stays creamy, suits the method. Nutmeg is common in period spinach preparations and would not be out of place, though Ranhofer does not call for it.
Yield and serviceOne 1 lb piece serves two to three as a main course. Rest the meat a few minutes before removing the rind and slicing across the grain, and lay the slices on the spinach at the last moment so they do not weep onto the plate.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a record of that house's repertoire, which is why a plain English boiled-bacon dish sits between a whole lamb dish and a blood pudding under a French title. Petit salé is the old French term for small cuts of pork put down in salt, a domestic economy dish; adding fumé marks it as smoked, and à l'anglaise signals the plain English treatment, meaning boiled and served with a plainly dressed green vegetable rather than a sauce. Bacon or salt pork with greens was familiar in nineteenth-century English cookery, the sweetness of the leaf set against the salt and smoke, and what Ranhofer specifies here is largely discipline: unsalted cooking water, spinach cooked in its own separate salted water, and the leaves left whole. The book's habit of naming everything in French while cooking much of it in the English or American manner gives some sense of what a wealthy New York dining room expected in the 1890s.