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Spinach Au Veloute
Pick off stalks, remove stale leaves and thoroughly wash three quarts fresh green spinach plunge in a gallon boiling water with a tablespoon salt, boil ten minutes, thoroughly drain on sieve; with a skimmer press out water, chop very finely, then place in a saucepan. Mix in another saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter with two level tablespoons flour. Pour in three-quarters of a pint white broth mix well until it comes to a boil, let reduce to half, then strain sauce through a Chinese strainer into spinach, adding half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar, a saltspoon cayenne, a saltspoon grated nutmeg and half ounce good butter. Mix well, place pan on fire and cook for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile, remove, dress on a vegetable dish, smooth all around to dome form, arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around and serve.
A creamed spinach built on a proper velouté rather than cream, in the French style that ran through hotel kitchens of the period. Two things need adjusting: the blanching time and the vagueness of the broth.
- Ten minutes is far too longSpinach is limp and drab in well under a minute in that much boiling water. Blanch 30-60 seconds, then shock in cold water if you want to keep any green at all; the leaves get another ten minutes of cooking in the sauce at the end.
- How much spinachThree quarts of picked leaves, loosely measured, is roughly 12-16 oz raw, which cooks down to about a cup and a half of chopped spinach. A 1-lb bag of stemmed leaves is close enough.
- White brothAn unsalted veal or chicken stock, kept pale — no browned bones. Three-quarters of a pint is 1 1/2 cups; reduced by half it comes to about 3/4 cup of finished sauce, so use unsalted stock or the reduction will be over-seasoned.
- The velouté itselfCook the butter and flour together until it smells faintly of biscuit but takes no color, then add the stock. A roux that browns pushes the sauce towards a brown one and kills the point of the dish.
- Saltspoon and half ounceA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; the recipe stirs it in with the seasonings before the final ten minutes.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical sieve. Any fine-mesh strainer does the job; push the sauce through with a small ladle.
- CroutonsCut hearts from firm white bread and fry in butter until golden, or brush and bake in a moderate oven. Add them at the table, since they soften quickly against the wet spinach.
- YieldServes four to six as a side. The domed presentation holds best if the spinach is well pressed and the sauce genuinely thick.
Velouté — from velouté, velvety — is one of the mother sauces codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens: a pale roux moistened with white stock rather than milk, which is what separates it from béchamel. Dressing a vegetable au velouté was standard restaurant practice, and spinach suits it because it carries sauce well and, chopped fine, can be molded into the smooth dome the recipe calls for. Nutmeg with spinach and with white sauces is a long-standing convention rather than a flourish here. The International Cook Book was assembled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and the fussy finish — the pressed spinach, the strained sauce, the six heart-shaped croutons counted out — is professional hotel-kitchen discipline transplanted into a domestic book.