Home › The World's Kitchen › Cream of Spinach
Cream of Spinach
If there be any stale stalks or leaves from a quart of very fresh spinach remove them, otherwise use everything; thoroughly wash and plunge into two quarts of boiling water for five minutes, drain on a sieve, then chop very fine and place in a large saucepan with one ounce butter and cook on the range until all the moisture is evaporated. Sprinkle over two ounces flour, mix well with the wooden spoon, moisten with one quart white broth and one pint milk. Season with a level tablespoon slat, a saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg. Mix well, and let boil for twenty-five minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with two gills cream, add to the soup with half ounce good butter and mix well while heating without boiling for five minutes. Strain the soup through a sieve into a basin, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen, and serve with bread croutons separately.
A classic velvet spinach soup built on a roux, finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Two details carry it: the liaison must never boil, and the salt as written is far more than most cooks will want.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the diluted yolks go in, hold the soup below a simmer — 170-180F is the target. A boil will scramble the yolks and the soup turns grainy; straining will mask mild curdling but will not restore a badly broken soup.
- Gills and ouncesA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup. The ounces are weights: 1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons, 2 oz flour is a scant half cup, half an ounce butter is 1 tablespoon.
- Saltspoon, and that tablespoon of saltA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so cayenne and nutmeg are modest. The "level tablespoon slat" (salt) is a typesetter's slip for salt and assumes unsalted stock — with commercial broth start with a teaspoon and correct at the end.
- White brothA light, uncoloured stock from veal or chicken bones, made without browning. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour.
- A quart of spinachA volume measure of raw leaves, loosely filled — roughly 4 to 6 oz of modern bagged spinach. Baby spinach needs no stemming and can go straight into the boiling water.
- Drying the puréeCooking the chopped spinach with butter until the moisture has gone is what keeps the finished soup from tasting watery, and it lets the flour cook into fat rather than water. Expect five to eight minutes over medium heat, stirring.
- Twenty-five minutes of boilingLong by modern standards and it will dull the green, but it is what cooks out the raw flour. If colour matters more to you than strict fidelity, fifteen minutes is enough for a roux of this size.
- The double strainingSieve first, then cheesecloth. A blender and a fine chinois will get you to the same place with less loss; the cloth pass is what gives the soup its characteristic smoothness.
- YieldAbout three pints of finished soup — six first-course servings. Fry the croutons in butter and pass them separately so they stay crisp.
Cream soups of this kind belong to the classic French repertoire that dominated hotel and restaurant kitchens on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900, and the recipe's vocabulary gives away its origin: white broth for fond blanc, the flour-and-butter base, and above all the finishing liaison of egg yolks beaten with cream, the standard professional method for enriching and lightly thickening a soup off the boil. Strictly, a soup thickened with a roux and finished this way would be classed as a velouté rather than a true cream, though English-language books of the period used "cream of" loosely for anything smooth and pale. Spinach was a natural candidate because it purées finely and gives colour without much flavour of its own, and the pairing with nutmeg is old and durable — it appears in spinach dishes across French, Italian and English cookery long before this book. The instruction to strain twice, through sieve then cheesecloth, is a mark of the professional kitchen rather than the household one: it costs volume and time, and buys only texture.