Home › A Calendar of Dinners › May 22
May 22
Menu: Little Neck Clams; Parmentier Puree; Veal Cutlets; Mashed Potatoes; Spinach, Martha; Chicory Salad; Biscuit Tortoni; Coffee Spinach, Martha-Trim off stalks of 3 quarts fresh spinach, discarding stale leaves if any. Thoroughly wash and drain, plunge in gallon boiling water with 1 tablespoon salt and boil for 10 minutes. Take them up with skimmer, drain on sieve, press out all water, chop finely, place in saucepan. Cut 3 slices bread in / inch square pieces, place on plate, pour over them 1 tablespoon vinegar, then brown them in small frying pan with 1 tablespoon melted Crisco to golden color, add them to spinach, with 2 hard-cooked eggs cut into 8 pieces each, 1 tablespoon Crisco, salt, sugar, grated nutmeg to taste, and 4 tablespoons cream. Mix well with wooden spoon and cook 10 minutes, lightly mixing once in a while, dress on vegetable dish and serve.
A German-style creamed spinach with vinegar croutons and chopped egg, from the era when greens were boiled hard and long. Two changes make it worth cooking: shorten the blanch and treat the croutons carefully.
- Cut the boiling timeTen minutes in salted water turns fresh spinach to olive-drab sludge. One to two minutes is enough to wilt it fully; drop it straight into cold water, then squeeze dry in a towel. The later ten-minute simmer in the pan finishes the cooking.
- Quantity of spinachThree quarts of loose leaves is roughly 12 oz to 1 lb untrimmed, which cooks down to about a cup of chopped spinach. The recipe gives no yield, but this would serve about four as a side dish.
- CriscoCrisco in 1913 was a newly introduced hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, marketed as a neutral replacement for lard and butter. Any mild fat works; butter is better for the croutons, and a spoonful of butter stirred in at the end improves the finish.
- The bread diceThe size is given as a fraction that has not survived legibly; half-inch cubes are the sensible reading for croutons. Three slices of bread yields a generous handful.
- Vinegar on the breadPouring a tablespoon of vinegar over the cubes before frying is the point of the dish -- it gives the sour note that cuts the cream. Let the bread absorb it for a minute, then fry over moderate heat until golden, and add the croutons at the very end if you want them crisp rather than soft.
- Hard-cooked eggsQuartered rather than eighthed holds up better to the stirring. Add them last and fold gently so they do not break up into the spinach.
- SeasoningSalt, sugar and nutmeg "to taste" means restraint: a pinch of sugar, and nutmeg grated to no more than a quarter teaspoon. Nutmeg with spinach and cream is a fixed pairing in German and French cookery.
- CreamFour tablespoons of heavy cream for this volume of spinach makes a loose creamed dish, not a thick one. Reduce over moderate heat if it looks watery after the squeezed spinach releases more liquid.
Spinach dressed with fried bread, chopped egg and a little vinegar resembles German household treatments of spinach, and such dishes reached American cookbooks through the professional French-German kitchen vocabulary that ran through hotel cooking around 1900. The name "Martha" appears to follow the nineteenth-century convention of tagging garnished dishes with personal names, in the same family as potatoes Anna; it carries no reliable story behind it. Its appearance here is commercial: The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks that a vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard in every course, and a Calendar of Dinners with a Crisco line in nearly every dish was the argument. The long boil is not an error of the author but standard practice of the day, before shorter cooking of green vegetables became the rule.