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Poached Eggs with Spinach
Prepare half the quantity only of spinach in cream. Arrange on a hot dish, smooth the surface neatly, lay twelve poached eggs on top of the spinach and serve.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a standalone recipe: the work is in the creamed spinach and the poaching, and the original assumes you have already read both entries elsewhere in the book.
- "Half the quantity" of spinachThe reference is to the book's spinach-in-cream entry, whose scale is not given here. For twelve eggs, a workable modern amount is about 2 lb of fresh spinach (or 20 oz frozen leaf spinach, thawed and squeezed dry) bound with roughly a cup of béchamel or reduced cream.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, two eggs each. Halve everything for three.
- Squeeze the spinach hardThis is the hinge. Wet spinach releases liquid onto the platter and the eggs slide. Press the cooked spinach in a sieve or twist it in a towel before creaming it, and let the cream reduce until it mounds on a spoon.
- Poaching waterBarely simmering water with a splash of vinegar; many cooks omit salt on the grounds that it makes the whites spread, though this is disputed. Around three minutes gives a set white and a liquid yolk. Fresh eggs hold their shape better than old ones.
- Poach aheadTwelve eggs are difficult to poach to order for a single platter. Poach them in batches, slide them into cold water, then rewarm for 30 seconds in hot water and drain on a towel before laying them out.
- Trim the eggsClassical practice was to cut the ragged skirt off each poached egg with a knife or round cutter; combined with the recipe's instruction to smooth the spinach neatly, that is the difference between a composed dish and a heap.
- Hot dish means hotThe recipe calls for a hot dish; warm the serving platter in a low oven. Creamed spinach cools fast, and nothing here is poured over the top to hold heat.
- Raw yolksA properly poached egg yolk is not brought to a pasteurizing temperature. For anyone pregnant, very young, elderly or immunocompromised, use pasteurized-in-shell eggs or cook the yolks through.
Eggs set on a bed of creamed spinach is the dish French kitchens call oeufs à la florentine — "Florentine" being the long-standing culinary shorthand for spinach, traditionally traced to Catherine de' Medici's supposed fondness for it, a story usually repeated and rarely documented. What the entry really shows is how a professional cookbook was organized: a stock of prepared components — spinach in cream, poached eggs, béchamel — each written out once, then recombined across dozens of short entries like this one.