No. 2823

Spinach, English Style

Epinards a l'Anglaise

Pick and wash the spinach in several waters; blanch it in an untinned copper vessel with boiling, salted water; drain well and cut it up without chopping; now put it into a saucepan on the fire, season with salt and pour it into a vegetable dish, cover with small bits of fresh butter, set on the cover and serve very hot.

← No. 2822 Spinach a la Rougemont Cabbages & Greens No. 2824 Squash-Marrow-with Parmesan →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's plainest spinach: blanched, drained, dressed with nothing but salt and cold butter. It stands or falls on how thoroughly the water is driven out.

Skip the untinned copperThe bare copper is there for colour — copper ions bind the chlorophyll and hold a vivid green. Unlined copper leaches into salted and acidic food, and no modern kitchen needs it: blanch in a wide stainless or enamelled pot of hard-boiling salted water for 60–90 seconds and the green will be bright enough.
Wash in several waters, literallyBunch spinach carries grit in the crowns. Fill a basin, plunge and lift the leaves out rather than pouring the water off, and repeat until no sand settles at the bottom. Bagged washed leaf spinach can go straight in.
Drain well means pressThis is the hinge. After blanching, refresh briefly, then squeeze the spinach in a towel or press it hard in a sieve until it stops weeping. Butter will not cling to wet spinach, and the dish turns into green soup in the serving bowl.
"Cut it up without chopping"Ranhofer wants the leaf coarsely divided, not reduced to purée as in his creamed and sieved preparations. Slice the drained mass through two or three times with a knife so the strands still read as leaves.
On the fire, brieflyThe return to the saucepan is only to drive off residual moisture and warm the spinach through — a minute or two over good heat, stirring. Longer and it dulls to olive.
Fresh butter, uncookedThe butter is dotted on cold and melts under the cover on its way to the table, which is why the dish tastes of butter rather than of frying. Unsalted butter, generously: 2 to 3 tablespoons per pound of raw spinach.
YieldSpinach loses roughly nine-tenths of its bulk. Reckon 1 lb of raw leaf for two modest servings, or 3 lb for six as a side.

A Little History

"À l'anglaise" in nineteenth-century French kitchen language means plainly boiled and plainly served — the English manner as Paris understood it — and it marks this as the deliberate opposite of the sieved and creamed spinach preparations that surround it in The Epicurean (1894), where Charles Ranhofer set down the repertoire of Delmonico's in New York. The instruction to blanch in an untinned copper vessel reflects professional practice of the period, and is related to the older habit of adding a copper coin or a pinch of soda to the water; both were valued for fixing the green of vegetables, and both fell out of use as the risks of copper and the flavour cost of alkali became better understood. Ranhofer's insistence on "fresh butter" likely carries its period sense of unsalted butter, much butter of the time being salted for keeping.