Cream Spinach
To cream spinach, cook fourteen minutes in as little water as will keep it from burning. Drain, chop fine and heat again, in a little cream or milk, or a thin white sauce.
A three-line method that assumes you already know how much spinach to buy and what a white sauce is. The one thing worth changing is the cooking time.
- Fourteen minutes is far too longSpinach wilts fully in two to three minutes in the water clinging to its leaves, and at fourteen it turns olive-drab and loses most of its texture. Cook until just collapsed, then drain hard. The long time may reflect older, coarser spinach with thicker stems rather than the tender bagged leaf sold now.
- QuantityNo amount is given. Fresh spinach cooks down dramatically: 1 lb of leaves yields roughly a cup chopped, enough for two as a side. Frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed very dry, can stand in.
- "As little water as will keep it from burning"This means a splash in the bottom of a covered pan, not a pot of boiling water. Washed leaves put straight into a hot pan usually need no added water at all.
- Squeeze, don't just drainDrained spinach still holds a surprising amount of water, which will thin the cream and make the dish weep on the plate. Press it in a sieve or twist it in a towel before chopping.
- A thin white sauceStandard period proportions for a thin white sauce are about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to a cup of milk, cooked a few minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Roughly a half cup of sauce or cream to a pound of raw spinach will give a coating consistency rather than soup.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are standard with creamed spinach and were probably assumed; add them at the reheating stage, after the water has been driven off, or the salt reads flat.
Creamed spinach belongs to the plain vegetable cookery that household manuals of this sort treated as barely worth a paragraph — the assumption being that any cook knew how to boil a green and make a white sauce, so only the proportions needed stating. The technique itself — boil, drain, chop, finish in cream — parallels the French *épinards à la crème*, and the long boiling time is consistent with spinach that arrived from the garden with stems and grit rather than washed and bagged.