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Poached Eggs, Florentine
Remove the stalks and thoroughly wash a pint and a half very fresh spinach, and plunge in a quart boiling water with half a teaspoon salt and boil for fifteen minutes. Drain on a sieve, press out all the water and chop very finely. Place in a saucepan with half ounce butter, half a gill cream, two saltspoons salt, half teaspoon sugar, two saltspoons pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well and let cook for five minutes. Dress the spinach on a hot dish.
Prepare twelve poached eggs without toasts. Lay them over the spinach and serve.
A straightforward dish whose only real problem is the boiling time; everything else is a matter of translating the measures.
- The fifteen-minute boilSpinach cooked a quarter of an hour collapses to a grey, sulphurous paste. Two minutes in boiling salted water is enough to wilt it fully, and the five minutes in the buttered cream afterwards finishes the job.
- A gillHalf a gill is a quarter cup of cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons salt" is half a teaspoon and the nutmeg comes to a scant quarter teaspoon.
- How much spinach"A pint and a half" measures leaves by volume, and loosely piled raw spinach measures very differently from packed. Taken literally it is about three cups of leaves, only a few ounces once cooked and pressed -- thin cover for twelve eggs, and the quart of boiling water confirms the small scale. If you want a proper bed under twelve eggs you will need considerably more than the recipe states.
- Squeeze it dryPressing out the water is the hinge of the dish. Wet spinach thins the cream, weeps onto the platter and slides the eggs about. Wring it in a towel until no more liquid comes.
- "Poached eggs without toasts"The book elsewhere sets poached eggs on rounds of fried bread or toast; here they go straight onto the spinach bed. Poach in barely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, three minutes for a set white and running yolk, and trim the ragged edges before laying them out.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, four if it is the only substantial course. Everything must be hot at once, so warm the platter and poach the eggs last.
- Gratin optionThe version most cooks now expect has Mornay sauce spooned over and browned under a grill. This one is deliberately plainer, and the creamed spinach carries it.
"Florentine" on a French menu means, with very few exceptions, spinach underneath. The usage is generally traced to Catherine de' Medici, who is said to have brought both a fondness for spinach and Florentine cooks with her to the French court in 1533 — a story repeated in nearly every cookbook of this period and documented in almost none of them. What is certain is that by the time this book was compiled the label was fixed kitchen shorthand in professional French service, applied to eggs, sole, chicken and anything else that could be set on a bed of buttered spinach. Its inclusion in a section called The World's Kitchen reflects the ambition of the international compilations of the era: to put the classical French repertoire, in simplified form, into an American household cook's hands.}