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Side-Dish of Spinach
(Spinaci per contorno) After cooking the spinach in boiling water and chopping them fine, the spinach can be cooked in different ways: 1. With butter, salt and pepper, adding a little brown stock, if you have it, or a few tablespoonfuls of broth, or milk. 2. With onion sauce (onion chopped very fine) and butter. 3. With butter salt and pepper, adding a very small pinch of grated cheese. 4. With butter, a drop of olive oil and tomato sauce (No. 12) or tomato paste diluted with soup stock or water. 114
This is a set of four finishing treatments rather than a single recipe; the original assumes you know how to boil and drain spinach and only tells you what to do next. Two details do the real work: getting the water out, and keeping the quantity honest.
- Squeeze it dryBlanched spinach holds an astonishing amount of water, and any of these four finishes will turn to grey soup if you skip this. Drain, cool briefly, then press the spinach hard in your hands or in a clean towel before chopping.
- Blanching timeBoiling water, salted, and one to two minutes is enough for mature leaves; baby spinach needs barely thirty seconds.
- QuantityThe book gives no amount. Reckon on 1 lb (450 g) of untrimmed spinach per two people as a side dish; it cooks down to roughly a cup of chopped leaf. Frozen chopped spinach works for all four versions, thawed and wrung out.
- "Contorno"The Italian title means garnish or accompaniment, the plate's supporting element beside a roast or cutlet, not a course of its own.
- Brown stockThe first version's "brown stock" is most likely the book's own sugo di carne, a concentrated reduced meat gravy, richer and more gelatinous than tinned broth. Pan juices from a roast are the closest everyday substitute; a tablespoon or two is plenty.
- Grated cheeseIn this book that most likely means Parmesan, dry-grated. The "very small pinch" is deliberate restraint, and the cheese is best added off the heat.
- Tomato sauce No. 12A cross-reference to the book's own tomato sauce. Any plain tomato sauce serves, or the stated alternative of tomato paste loosened with stock. Use it sparingly; the spinach should not be swamped.
- Onion sauceFor version two, sweat the finely chopped onion gently in the butter until soft and pale before the spinach goes in. Onion added raw to already-cooked spinach stays harsh.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was written for American households at a moment when Italian cooking was being translated for readers who had never seen it, and passages like this one show the method: give the technique once, then list variations by number rather than repeat a recipe four times. The approach is borrowed from Pellegrino Artusi, whose La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891) was the dominant Italian domestic cookbook of the period. The frame of reference here tends to be Tuscan and northern, where spinach cooked in butter is standard; a southern book might be more likely to reach for olive oil and garlic, though the recipe's own fourth variation uses olive oil. Spinach itself came to Italy through Arab Sicily and Spain and had been a kitchen-garden staple for centuries by the time of writing, and Gentile spends her words on the sauces instead.