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Spinach Salad (Putting away the spinach)
In putting away the spinach reserved for salad, marinate it with a little French dressing and pack in a mold or small cups; then it is ready to turn out on the salad dish.
This is a coda to a spinach recipe earlier in the book: the cook is told what to do with the cooked spinach set aside for salad rather than served hot. It assumes chopped, thoroughly drained cooked spinach and a household that dressed salads from a cruet.
- What "putting away" meansIt means storing, not discarding. The recipe assumes some cooked spinach has been set aside for a later cold salad course rather than served hot; when that setting-aside happens is not stated.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing. It is a plain vinaigrette: oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, shaken or whisked to a temporary emulsion; period recipes run roughly two to four parts oil to one of vinegar.
- Drain hard firstThe hinge of the whole thing. Cooked spinach holds an enormous amount of water, and molded spinach that has not been pressed dry will weep dressing onto the salad dish and collapse when turned out. Squeeze it in a cloth or press it in a sieve before dressing.
- The mold"Small cups" here are most likely teacups or custard cups, used as forms. Pack the spinach in firmly and chill; with no gelatine involved, it is the firm packing and thorough draining, more than the cold, that let it turn out whole.
- StorageRefrigerate and use within two days.
- ServingThe book gives no quantity. Reckon one small cup per person, turned out onto a lettuce leaf; a hard-boiled egg slice or a spoonful of extra dressing over the top is in keeping with the period.
Molded vegetables were a fixture of American salad courses around 1900, when "salad" meant a composed, chilled, shaped thing as often as a bowl of leaves. The technique here is thrift dressed as elegance: cooked spinach left from a hot dish is seasoned, packed into whatever small vessel the kitchen owns, and reappears the next day looking deliberate. Spinach itself was still somewhat fashionable food in this period, promoted in cookbooks as wholesome and "strengthening," a reputation that rested on iron and the general dietetics of the day. The instruction's placement as an afterthought is characteristic of the genre, which routinely told the reader how to convert yesterday's vegetables into today's course rather than treating leftovers as a separate subject.