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Spinach Salad (Look over a half peck)
Look over a half peck of spinach, remove roots and yellow leaves, and wash five or six times to remove all grit and dirt; drop into boiling salted water and cook for twenty minutes uncovered; press out all the water and chop very fine; while hot, mix with it a highly seasoned French dressing. Pack in small oiled molds and set away until very cold. Turn out on well blanched lettuce leaves, garnish with whites of eggs and cold tongue cut in strips or rings. On top of each mold put a little heap of sieved hard boiled yolk and pass mayonnaise separately.
A pressed spinach salad of the sort that filled the cold-course slot at turn-of-the-century luncheons. Two things need attention: the quantity, which is given in dry measure, and the cooking time, which is four times longer than spinach can stand.
- Half a peck of spinachA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts of loosely heaped leaves — this is a volume, not a weight, and how much it comes to depends entirely on how the greens were piled. Reckon on roughly 2 to 3 lb of untrimmed spinach, which cooks down to about 2 cups of chopped pulp.
- Twenty minutes is far too longSpinach is done in 1 to 2 minutes in boiling salted water. Twenty minutes turns it olive-grey and sulphurous, and since the dish is served cold with no sauce to hide behind, colour is the whole point. Blanch briefly, then drain.
- Cooking uncoveredThe instruction is worth keeping. Cooks have long left the pot open on the reasoning that volatile acids escape and green vegetables hold their colour better; in practice the length of cooking matters more than the lid, so it counts for most in a short blanch.
- Press out all the waterThis is the hinge. Wrap the chopped spinach in a clean towel and wring it hard — any water left behind will weep into the mold overnight and the salad will collapse when turned out.
- Dress it hotWarm spinach absorbs the oil and vinegar; cold spinach sheds them. "Highly seasoned" French dressing here means a sharp vinaigrette with plenty of salt, pepper, mustard and perhaps a little onion juice, since chilling flattens seasoning noticeably.
- Oiled moldsAny small cup, ramekin or timbale mold will do, brushed with a neutral oil. Chill at least four hours, preferably overnight, so the pressed spinach sets firm enough to unmold cleanly.
- Cold tongueCooked beef tongue was a standard larder item and is now a special order at best. Thin strips of good ham, prosciutto or roast beef give the same salty-red contrast against the green.
- YieldProbably four to six small molds, enough for a light first course or a luncheon salad, though the recipe gives no count. The mayonnaise passed separately is doing real work beyond decoration, since the molds carry only the vinaigrette.
Molded vegetable salads like this one belong to the era when a salad was expected to arrive at the table shaped, garnished and cold rather than tossed. The technique resembles French *pain d'épinards* and the timbale tradition — cooked greens pressed into a form, chilled until they hold, then turned out and dressed up with sieved egg yolk, whites cut in rings, and strips of cured meat — though no line of transmission can be traced. The *Twentieth Century Cook Book* dates from the period when American household manuals were absorbing this French service wholesale, and one may guess that the elaborate garnish served a practical end — spinach pulp, however well seasoned, is a dull-looking thing, so the visual interest had to be built on top of it. Buying greens by the peck was still ordinary at the turn of the century, when produce came from a market stall in a basket rather than a bag on a scale, and the vigorous instruction to wash five or six times reflects field spinach grown in sandy soil and delivered with the grit still on it.