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Spareribs and Spinach
Procure six pieces salted spareribs or pork and soak in cold water for thirty minutes. Drain, place in saucepan with enough water to cover, add two carrots cut in quarters, an onion with two cloves in and one bean garlic. Season with half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, cover pan and let boil for forty-five minutes. Add six even-sized, peeled, large raw potatoes and boil for thirty-five minutes. Dress a spinach on a hot dish, take up spareribs with a fork, place over spinach, arrange potatoes around beef and serve.
A plain boiled dinner of the sort that fed cities before pork was refrigerated. Two things in the text will trip you: the spinach is never actually cooked in the instructions, and the potatoes are given far longer than they need.
- Salted spareribsThese are ribs cured in brine or dry salt, once sold from the barrel in any pork butcher's. Salt pork belly or a lightly cured rib rack is the nearest thing now; if you use fresh spareribs, skip the soak and salt the cooking water instead.
- The soak is not optionalThe soak matters -- thirty minutes in cold water suits a cure heavier than most of what is sold today. Taste the water after simmering fifteen minutes and if it is aggressively salty, pour it off and start again with fresh water.
- "One bean garlic"A single clove. The phrasing reads as a literal rendering of the French gousse (a pod), and points to a cook trained in French kitchen language writing for an American audience.
- The onion with clovesA whole peeled onion studded with two whole cloves, the classic oignon clouté. It goes in whole and comes out whole; it is aromat, not a vegetable to be served.
- Potato timingWhole large potatoes need roughly 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer, and at a full rolling boil they will collapse into the broth. Add them so they finish with the meat, and keep the pan at a slow simmer rather than the "boil" the text calls for.
- Season at the endHalf a teaspoon each of salt and pepper is written for meat that was still going to give up salt into the pot. Add pepper freely, but hold the salt until you have tasted the finished broth.
- The spinach"Dress a spinach on a hot dish" gives no method at all; the reader was expected to know one. Wilting the leaves in their own water, draining hard, chopping and finishing with butter will serve. Raw spinach cooks down to very little, so buy generously.
- "Around beef"There is no beef in this dish; the word appears to be a slip for the ribs. Arrange the potatoes around the spareribs.
- YieldSix pieces of rib and six potatoes: six modest servings, or four generous ones. Keep the strained cooking liquid, which is a good base for a pea or lentil soup the next day.
Salted spareribs belong to the era when a hog was broken down in cold weather and the parts that could not be eaten at once went into brine or a salt box. Boiling with root vegetables was a standard way to make such meat palatable again: the water pulls out the salt while the carrot, onion and clove supply what the cure has flattened. The phrasing here -- "a bean garlic", "dress a spinach" -- points to a cook thinking in French and writing in English. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and it is full of exactly this: continental hotel technique applied to whatever the American market happened to sell, filed under whichever nation's kitchen it was thought to represent.