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Omelette with Spinach
Remove stalks and stale leaves from a pint fresh spinach, thoroughly wash and drain, plunge into a pint water with half teaspoon salt and boil for ten minutes. Drain on a sieve, press out all the water with the hands, and chop up exceedingly fine. Place in a small saucepan with half ounce butter, half a gill cream, two saltspoons salt, half a teaspoon sugar and a saltspoon white pepper; stir well while heating for two minutes.
Prepare a plain omelette and just before folding up spread over a third of the quantity of the spinach; fold up, turn the omelette upon a hot dish, arrange the rest of the spinach at both ends of the dish, and serve.
A straightforward filled omelette, but the measurements are in vanished units and the spinach is boiled about five times longer than anyone would boil it now.
- A gill and a saltspoonA gill is 4 fl oz in US measure and 5 fl oz imperial, so half a gill of cream is somewhere between 1/4 cup and a scant 1/3 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making "two saltspoons salt" half a teaspoon and the white pepper 1/4 teaspoon. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- A pint of spinachSpinach here is measured by volume, loosely packed, which is genuinely imprecise — perhaps a couple of ounces of untrimmed leaves, more if packed down, cooking to a very small quantity once chopped and pressed. Modern bagged baby spinach needs no stalk removal.
- Ten minutes is too longBoiled that long, spinach turns olive-drab and loses most of its texture. Two minutes in the salted water, or a simple wilt in a covered pan, gives the same drained, chopped result with the colour intact.
- Press it dryThis is the hinge. Wet spinach will thin the cream and leak into the eggs, so squeeze the drained leaves hard — in a clean towel is easier than by hand — before chopping.
- Chop, do not puree"Exceedingly fine" means knife-fine. A food processor turns it to a loose puree that slumps out of the fold rather than holding as a filling.
- The sugarHalf a teaspoon is specified, and reads as intentional rather than a slip; sugar is often used to soften the mineral edge of long-cooked spinach. With briefly cooked leaves a large pinch is plenty.
- The plain omeletteThe book assumes you already have its plain omelette recipe; no egg count, pan size or heat is given here. A modern default of two or three eggs beaten with a little salt and cooked in butter until just set will serve.
- YieldAs written this is one omelette, so one or two servings depending on the rest of the meal. The filling divides as the recipe says: a third inside, the rest banked at the two ends of the platter.
Spinach folded into eggs is one of the oldest and least changeable dishes in the French repertoire, and the pairing was so standard that cookery writers listed it simply as one of a long series of omelette variations — with cheese, with herbs, with kidneys, with spinach. The style of the instruction here, with its cream, butter, pinch of sugar and insistence on chopping fine, is the *épinards à la crème* treatment applied as a garnish rather than a side dish. Volume measures for leafy greens, a pint of spinach as though it were milk, are the main reason such recipes read oddly now.