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March 11
Menu: Asparagus Soup; Baked Salmon, Hollandaise Sauce; Mashed Potatoes *Spinach, a la Creme; Escarole Salad; Cheese Straws; Cocoanut Pudding Coffee Spinach, a la Creme-2 pounds spinach, pepper, salt, and nutmeg to taste, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup thick cream, and 1 teaspoon sugar. Wash and pick spinach, throw it into a pan of boiling water containing a little salt and soda; boil until tender, 10 to 15 minutes; pour on to a wire sieve, and squeeze out all the water; rub through the sieve with a wooden spoon; put spinach into a saucepan, with seasoning, butter, and cream. The spinach may be prepared as above and mixed with white sauce instead of cream; garnish with fried croutons.
A standard creamed spinach from the Crisco book's menu calendar, written when green vegetables were boiled far longer than anyone would boil them now. Two changes make the difference between drab and bright.
- Skip the sodaThe pinch of baking soda was added to keep the green vivid in long boiling. It does hold color briefly but breaks down the leaf into slime and destroys much of the vitamin C. Leave it out entirely and salt the water normally.
- Cut the cooking timeTen to fifteen minutes was for mature, coarse, field-grown spinach. Bagged spinach or young bunched leaves need 1 to 2 minutes in boiling water, or simply wilting in the pan with the water clinging to the leaves. Then shock in cold water if you want the color to hold.
- Squeeze hardThis is the hinge. Spinach holds an astonishing amount of water and any left behind will thin the cream into a puddle. Press it in the sieve, or gather it in a towel and wring it out, before it goes near the cream.
- The sieveRubbing through a wire sieve with a wooden spoon gives a smooth purée; a food processor does the same in seconds, though a few pulses is enough unless you want it wholly smooth. Chopping it coarsely on a board is also perfectly good and more like modern creamed spinach.
- Crisco or butterThe ingredient list calls for 2 tablespoons Crisco and the method then says butter, the kind of inconsistency that arises when existing recipes are reworked to substitute shortening for butter and lard. Use butter here: the dish depends on dairy flavor, and Crisco contributes none.
- Thick cream"Thick cream" here indicates a high-butterfat cream, near enough to today's heavy or whipping cream. Half a cup to 2 pounds of spinach is generous; add it gradually and stop when the texture suits you.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use less than seems necessary. Spinach and nutmeg is a long-standing French pairing, and the pre-ground jar tastes flat by comparison.
- YieldTwo pounds of raw spinach cooks down to something in the region of 2 cups once squeezed, enough for about four as a side dish.
The recipe comes from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookbooks — the company issued more than one for the hydrogenated vegetable shortening it had introduced in 1911 — and the day-by-day menu format matches the "Calendar of Dinners" material, which gave housekeepers a full year of menus in which Crisco quietly replaced butter and lard in nearly every line. The dish itself is older and French in origin: épinards à la crème, spinach boiled, puréed and finished with cream and nutmeg, was a fixture of nineteenth-century cookery on both sides of the Atlantic. The instruction to add soda to the boiling water reflects Victorian and Edwardian practice, which prized a bright green vegetable and had not yet weighed that against texture or nutrition; the note that white sauce may stand in for cream, and the fried croutons around the edge, are equally of the period, when a plain vegetable was expected to arrive garnished.