No. 729

Puree of Spinach or of Chiccory

Puree d'Epinards ou de Chicoree

Pick and wash the spinach leaves until very clean, having two pounds after this is done; cook them in boiling, salted water, and when they crush easily between the fingers, drain, refresh and drain them once more by pressing them well so as to extract all the water. Pound them thoroughly in a mortar, set them in a saucepan to heat, and season with salt, nutmeg, and sugar; stir in a pint of veloute (No. 415), and two spoonfuls of meat glaze (No. 402), and strain through a fine sieve; return them to the saucepan to heat well and just when ready to serve incorporate into the puree four ounces of fine butter.

The chiccory is to be prepared exactly the same as the spinach.

← No. 728 Puree of Sorrel Garnishings No. 730 Puree of Tomatoes →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French vegetable purée built on two mother-sauce components rather than cream. Nothing here is difficult, but the recipe assumes you have velouté and meat glaze already made, and that you own a mortar.

The two cross-referencesNo. 415 velouté is a white stock (veal or chicken) thickened with a blond roux and simmered until it coats; No. 402 meat glaze is brown stock reduced to a syrupy, sliceable concentrate. A good demi-glace or a spoonful of commercial glace de viande stands in for the latter; without either the purée tastes flat, since there is no cream in it at all.
Chicory means the leafFrench chicorée here is curly endive or escarole, not the coffee root and not Belgian endive. It is more bitter than spinach and may need a little longer in the water to soften, though the recipe says to handle it identically.
RefreshTo "refresh" is to plunge the drained greens into ice water, which stops the cooking and fixes the colour. Then squeeze hard — two pounds of spinach holds an astonishing amount of water, and any left behind will thin the purée.
Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds. Do not skip the sieve afterwards, though: passing the purée through a fine-mesh strainer or tamis is what separates this from creamed spinach, and it is the whole point of a garnishing purée.
SpoonfulsA "spoonful" in books of this period generally means a tablespoon. On that reading, two tablespoons of meat glaze into a pint of velouté is a seasoning amount, not a body-building one.
The butter goes in off the boilFour ounces of butter beaten into hot purée at the last moment is a monté au beurre. Once it is in, the purée must not boil again or the butter breaks and the sheen is lost. Finish it as the plates go out.
Sugar and nutmegThe sugar is corrective, not sweetening — a pinch to take the metallic edge off spinach and the bitterness off chicory. Nutmeg should be grated fresh and used with restraint.
YieldTwo pounds of raw leaf, a pint of velouté and four ounces of butter give roughly a quart of finished purée. The recipe itself states no yield or number of portions.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer was chef at Delmonico's in New York across two separate stints totalling some thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working system set down in print — which is why a simple spinach purée arrives with two numbered cross-references attached. The "Garnishings" section is not a chapter of side dishes in the modern sense but a catalogue of components: standardised purées, sauces and glazes that a brigade prepares in bulk and then draws on to compose a plate. The construction follows nineteenth-century French practice, where a vegetable purée is bound with a stock-based sauce rather than cream, sieved to a uniform texture and mounted with butter at the pass. Spinach and curly endive are given the same treatment here while sitting at opposite ends of the bitterness scale, and the pinch of sugar in both is often described as a correction for the vegetable's own sharpness rather than an attempt to sweeten it.