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Spinach a L'Anglaise
Trim away the stale leaves and stalks, clean and wash carefully in three different waters three quarts of fresh and sound spinach. Have in quite a large saucepan one gallon boiling water with one tablespoon salt. When the water is thoroughly boiling plunge in the spinach. Cover the pan and allow to thoroughly boil for ten minutes. Lift it up with a skimmer. Lay on a sieve to drain well.
Lightly brown in a saucepan one ounce good butter, then add the well-drained spinach. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, adding one teaspoon powdered sugar. Mix well with a fork occasionally while cooking for five minutes.
A plain boiled-and-buttered spinach in the French manner of naming, from a period when green vegetables were cooked far longer than anyone would tolerate now. Most of it translates directly; the boiling time does not.
- Ten minutes is the thing to changeModern spinach, whether bunched or bagged, is tender in 60 to 90 seconds in boiling water. Ten minutes leaves it grey-olive and slack. Blanch briefly, drain hard, then proceed with the butter step as written.
- Three quarts of spinachThat is a volume measure of raw leaves, loosely filled, roughly 12 oz to 1 lb. It cooks down to about a cup and a half, which is the recipe's real yield: two to three side servings.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive; start with less and taste.
- Powdered sugarIn 1906 this generally meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. A teaspoon of ordinary sugar is the right substitution, and it is there to round the mineral edge of the leaf rather than to sweeten.
- Three watersStill worth doing with bunched spinach, which carries sand in the crowns. Lift the leaves out of the water each time rather than pouring off, so the grit stays behind. Prewashed bagged spinach needs one rinse at most.
- "Lightly brown" the butterAn ounce is two tablespoons. Take it just to the nut-brown stage and no further; once the milk solids blacken the whole dish tastes scorched, and there is nothing else in the pan to hide it.
- Drain properlySpinach holds an astonishing amount of water. Press it in the sieve, or squeeze it in a towel, before it meets the butter, or the finish will be a pale broth rather than a glaze.
À l'anglaise is a French kitchen label meaning, roughly, plainly boiled in salted water and served without a sauce beyond butter, and its appearance on a spinach dish in a New York cookbook of 1906 shows how thoroughly the French professional vocabulary had been absorbed by American hotel cooking. Alessandro Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's, wrote for a readership that expected the classical naming even for something as ordinary as buttered spinach. The pinch of sugar is not unique to this book: nineteenth-century spinach could be coarse, late-cut and faintly bitter, and some cooks corrected it with a little sugar or a spoon of cream. The long boil belongs to the same era's general suspicion of undercooked vegetables, and it is the one instruction here that has not survived contact with modern taste.