Home › The World's Kitchen › Potatotes, Vert-Pre
Potatotes, Vert-Pre
Remove the stalks and thoroughly wash a pint of very fresh spinach leaves, drain, and plunge in a quart of boiling water with a teaspoon salt for ten minutes. Drain on a sieve and press out all the water, then chop them exceedingly fine. Prepare a mashed potato preparation add and mix well the spinach with the potatoes, dress on a vegetable dish, neatly smooth all around with the blade of a knife and serve.
A green mashed potato, blanched spinach folded into an ordinary purée. The whole thing hangs on getting the spinach dry and cut fine enough to disappear into the potato.
- A pint of spinachSpinach was often measured by volume in recipes of this kind. A pint of leaves, depending how tightly packed, is roughly 3-5 oz raw, which cooks down to a couple of tablespoons once squeezed. A modern 5 oz bag is about the right order of quantity.
- Ten minutes is longLong boiling times for greens are common in cookbooks of this period, and they drive out both colour and flavour. Two to three minutes is enough to wilt spinach fully; longer only makes the squeezing easier.
- Press it hardWet spinach will slacken the potato into soup. Squeeze it in a clean towel until no more liquid comes, then chop. The recipe's "exceedingly fine" means near a paste, so the green reads as colour rather than as strands.
- The mashed potato preparationThe recipe assumes a plain mashed potato already made and gives no quantities. As a workable base: about 2 lb floury potatoes, boiled and riced, with 2-3 oz butter and enough hot milk or cream to loosen, seasoned with salt and white pepper. Keep it on the stiff side to allow for the spinach.
- Fold off the heatMix the spinach in while the potato is hot but away from direct heat, and stop as soon as the colour is even. Beating a purée once the starch has set makes it gluey.
- Dressing the dishSmoothing the surface with a knife blade is the finish the recipe calls for, and a common one for a moulded vegetable sent to table. A hot dish and a blade dipped in hot water give the clean face intended.
- YieldWith a mashed potato base of about 2 lb potatoes, enough for six as a side. Best made and served at once; reheated, the green dulls to olive.
Vert-pré — "green meadow" — is a French kitchen term for dishes served green, most familiarly a grilled steak with watercress and straw potatoes, but also applied to purées and sauces tinted with spinach or herbs. Spinach was a standard colouring agent in the professional French repertoire of the period, either as a fine purée or as the pressed green extract known as vert d'épinards, used to tint butters and sauces. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York; its entries are short and service-style, and this one assumes the reader already has a mashed potato preparation to hand rather than spelling it out.