No. 2822

Spinach a la Rougemont

Epinards a la Rougemont

Have the spinach picked and prepared the same as for a la Noailles (No. 2821). Brown a piece of butter to hazel-nut (No. 567), put in the spinach, place the pan on a hot fire, stir continually until the spinach is consistent and the moisture evaporated; season with salt and nutmeg; thicken with espagnole sauce (No. 414), a little chicken glaze (No. 398), and fresh butter; dress it in a dome-form and decorate around with small bouchees of sweetbreads, mingled with very rich and thick financiere sauce (No. 464).

← No. 2821 Spinach a la Noailles Cabbages & Greens No. 2823 Spinach, English Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references, assuming a brigade and a larder full of standing sauces. Stripped down, this is blanched spinach dried out in browned butter, bound with a dark sauce, and ringed with sweetbread pastries.

The hinge: dry the spinachEverything depends on "stir continually until the spinach is consistent and the moisture evaporated." Blanched spinach holds an enormous amount of water; squeeze it hard in a towel first, then keep it moving over high heat until it stops weeping and pulls away from the pan. Add the sauce to wet spinach and you get grey soup that will not hold a dome.
"Picked and prepared" (No. 2821)The detail sits in the cross-referenced recipe, not here; in Ranhofer's usage this generally means stemmed leaf by leaf, washed in several waters, blanched in plenty of salted boiling water until just wilted, refreshed in cold water, then pressed dry and chopped. Something on the order of 3 lb of untrimmed bunch spinach will serve four; it collapses dramatically in the pot.
Butter browned "to hazel-nut"Beurre noisette: melt the butter, let it foam, and take it off the moment the milk solids turn the colour of a hazelnut shell and it smells of toasted nuts, two to three minutes. A few seconds past that it is beurre noir and bitter.
Espagnole and chicken glazeEspagnole is the old brown mother sauce, a roux-thickened brown stock; chicken glaze is chicken stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. Two or three tablespoons of good demi-glace and a teaspoon of reduced stock or a commercial glace de volaille will stand in. They are seasoning and body here, not a coating; the spinach should be dark and glossy, not swimming.
Financiere sauceClassically a Madeira-spiked demi-glace finished with mushroom and truffle essence; Ranhofer's No. 464 is referenced but not reproduced here. The recipe does specify it be "very rich and thick." Madeira demi-glace with finely chopped sauteed mushrooms is a reasonable domestic version.
Bouchees and sweetbreadsBouchees are small puff-pastry cases, roughly 1 1/2 inches across; frozen vol-au-vent shells work. Veal sweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanched, trimmed of membrane, then pressed under a weight before being diced and sauced. Order them ahead from a butcher.
NutmegGrate it fresh and use less than instinct suggests. Spinach and nutmeg is a classical pairing, but pre-ground nutmeg goes dusty and will read as sweetness against the brown sauce.
Dressing and yieldPack the finished spinach into a small bowl and turn it out to get the dome, then set the bouchees around the base at the last moment so the pastry stays crisp. The original gives no yield; scaled as above it makes about four servings as a garnished vegetable course. As written it is a side dish for a large dinner, not a main.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after some three decades as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and it shows exactly how that kitchen worked: almost nothing is cooked from scratch at the moment of service, because espagnole, chicken glaze and financiere sauce were already standing on the stove. Dishes named "a la Rougemont" and "a la Noailles" follow the nineteenth-century convention of attaching an aristocratic or patron's name to a garnish formula rather than to a technique, and Ranhofer, trained in France before he crossed the Atlantic, kept those labels intact for his American clientele. Financiere garnish itself, said to be named for its costly components, is the tell: truffle, mushroom, Madeira and sweetbreads turn a plate of spinach into a course fit for the restaurant's private dining rooms. The book was written partly as a record and partly as a monument, and pages like this one preserve a style of vegetable cookery, in which the vegetable is a plinth for the garnish, that had largely gone out of fashion within a generation.