Spinach
To cook spinach, not more than fourteen or twenty-one minutes with a small piece of salt pork, season with pepper, drain and chop fine, or it may be in a little water cooked; seasoned with butter, pepper and salt, and hard boiled eggs, sliced thin.
A terse, slightly garbled entry offering two treatments of spinach: boiled with salt pork, or stewed in a little water and finished with butter and egg. The instructions assume knowledge the modern cook has to supply.
- The timing is the problemFourteen to twenty-one minutes will reduce spinach to a grey-green pulp. Mature leaves need three to five minutes in a covered pan; young leaf spinach wilts in under two. The long boil may reflect the coarser, thick-stemmed spinach of the period, often sold with grit and root still attached.
- Salt porkA cured, unsmoked pork belly or fatback, sold near the bacon in some markets. A one- to two-inch cube is enough for a pound or two of greens. Blanched bacon works, though it adds smoke the original did not intend. Season with pepper only until you have tasted, as the pork carries the salt.
- "Cooked in a little water"For the second method, no added water is really needed. Spinach washed and lifted straight into the pan carries enough clinging water to steam itself; a tablespoon or two in the bottom of the pot is insurance against scorching.
- WashingThe recipe skips this step, which such books commonly left unstated. Spinach was often sold sandy. Wash in several changes of cold water, lifting the leaves out rather than pouring the water off, so the grit stays behind.
- Drain hardChopped spinach holds a surprising amount of water and will thin any butter or sauce you add. Press it in a colander with the back of a spoon, or squeeze it in a towel, before chopping and seasoning.
- YieldA pound of fresh spinach cooks down to roughly a cup — two modest servings. Buy far more than looks reasonable.
- The eggsThe wording leaves it open, but sliced hard-boiled eggs over buttered spinach reads more as a garnish than a mixed-in ingredient. Adding them at the table keeps the whites from breaking up.
Spinach reached English and American kitchens as a Lenten and early-spring vegetable, valued because it came up before almost anything else in the kitchen garden. The two treatments here mark a real division in period cookery: the pork-boiled version belongs to the American and Southern tradition of cooking all greens with a piece of cured pork for fat and salt, while the buttered spinach garnished with sliced hard-boiled egg is a lighter, more European service. The long cooking time reflects the spinach of the period, which was generally a tough, overwintered, thick-stalked plant rather than the tender baby leaf sold today, and period household books are often said to have directed cooks to boil greens far longer than anyone now would.