The Escoffier Series continues with Chapter 13, vegetables
Spinach is our first offering today. Done simply and easily is the best. There’s every reason for me to think this is the last cooked spinach procedure you will need. It’s that good.
Fennel and okra are next. Easy to grow and wonderful to cook and eat. I’m including a recipe in the text at the bottom of the page for a fennel dish.
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The Escoffier series continues and today the first vegetable is spinach.
If you have memories of canned or frozen spinach you are right to make a face. Fresh spinach used to be a bag of dirt with greenery attached. They’ve improved production and packaging so spinach today rarely needs a wash. Sometimes it needed two to get all the sand off. Spinach today mostly seems to be baby spinach which is a smaller leaf than how big spinach can get. When it gets large, the stem is nearly inedible and has to be removed. Baby spinach stems are fine to cook since they wilt right down to nothing like the leaves.
Escoffier boiled the fresh spinach and in most cases shocked it, squeezed out the excess water. There’s a lot of water, and then he carried on with the recipe.
When I was teaching culinary school I learned the best way to cook spinach. Up until that time it never occurred to me and no one I knew. There is a cooking competition for professional chefs called the Bocuse d’Or, or the Golden Bocuse, named after French chef Paul Bocuse. We showed one episode to our French class to illustrate just how precise and elegant French food can be. After, one judge, a chef, offered this tidbit about cooking spinach, which, as a judge, was critical for a good score. Saute it in whole butter, then add chopped garlic and grated nutmeg at the end. A bit of salt and pepper and that’s it.
The garlic is at the end, of course, so it doesn’t burn. In this case, no color is desired, even by me. The addition of two simple flavorings transforms the spinach into something far greater than just the ingredients used. I recommend that procedure to anyone who asks and some who don’t.
The other way to make spinach is creamed. Creamed spinach used to, and maybe still does, come in a can. My parents used to buy it and that I liked. I’ve moved on to homemade and like it better.
If you check the interwebs for creamed spinach you’ll find the first recipes use frozen spinach, that’s fine, and some add creamed cheese to the sauce. That’s cheesy spinach, not creamed spinach. The Joy of Cooking offers a purist’s recipe of only heavy cream.
In all cases, the spinach needs to be blanched and shocked and the water squeezed out of it. If you are using fresh, thaw it a day or two in advance or microwave until it is no longer frozen and the ice crystals are gone. Squeeze the water out of that. Be prepared to have far less spinach than you thought you would have.
For two pounds of fresh blanched squeezed spinach, heat and reduce half a cup of cream. Add the spinach to the cream and cook until the cream reduces and coats the spinach. If it gets too thick, add a bit of milk to bring it back. Finish with nutmeg and salt and pepper.
One alternate method is to make a Bechamel sauce, a roux-thickened milk-based sauce, add that to the spinach to the consistency you prefer, season and that’s it. Bechamel is a good sauce to have on hand for almost instant cheese sauce for cauliflower or broccoli, a soup base, or creamed spinach.
Escoffier comes close to the sauteeing procedure I mentioned with this, Epinards Mere-Louisette. Epinards is French for spinach. Wash, dry, and chop the spinach. Saute in whole butter until cooked and dry. Add very small dice of ham and croutons fried in clarified butter. Mix, season, and serve immediately. I sometimes render small diced bacon, leave all the fat, and cook the spinach in that. Add the garlic and nutmeg but I’ve never added the croutons. Sounds like a good idea and a nice texture twist.
There are some recipes for stuffed spinach leaves that I’ll not discuss. The task of unfurling a cooked, cooled spinach leaf, then stuffing it and folding it into a nice package is more than a bit taxing. That we mostly don’t have large spinach leaves makes that just the more challenging. Chard would work if you wanted to try that. Recipe 4100, Subrics d’Epinards.
One last recipe for spinach which is easier is to blanche and dry it, chop it roughly, and add an equal amount of Yorkshire pudding batter. Cook this as a crepe. The idea is sound and you can easily make a crepe batter, add finely chopped spinach, or spinach powder, to the crepe batter and make green crepes. That’s a fun twist and tasty.
Escoffier passes over Fennel which is too bad. And he says so, “This vegetable is not used very often which is a pity since it is of an excellent and delicate flavor.” I agree. He does suggest cooking it in any of the procedures for celery or cardoons. I’m going to give you one more. This was developed for a salmon dish. It can go with just about anything that’s the same or milder than salmon.
1 large onion, halved and sliced into 1/4″ half-moons
2 bulbs of fennel, stalks trimmed of fronds, and bulb and stalks diced into 1-inch pieces
Fronds saved for garnish
8 ounces diced tomatoes
1 T honey
2 oz dry white wine
2 oz water
1 T fennel seeds
Salt and pepper
extra virgin olive oil
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan heat the oil, add the onions and fennel seeds. Cook to extract the aroma from the seeds. When the onions are wilted and the seeds aromatic, add the fennel. Cook until the edges start to become translucent. Add the honey, wine, water, and tomatoes. Simmer for 15 minutes or until the fennel is tender. Add the chopped fennel fronds for garnish. Serve.
In the restaurant, this was made ahead and the fronds were added to order so they stayed fragrant and green.
The last vegetable today is okra.
Pickled okra is a popular use for okra and maybe I’ve just not had a good version yet. I’m not a fan. Could be that the okra used is too large so it’s too tough.
Fried okra is a bit addicting, especially if it’s done fresh and eaten right away.
Breading it is messy but simple. We have adapted an Alton Brown procedure to suit our gluten-free needs. We use equal parts corn meal, medium coarse, and gluten-free all-purpose flour, and salt and pepper thoroughly mixed in a 1-gallon zip-top bag.
One of my big pet peeves is frozen okra with the stem end included. I don’t want to eat the stem end. I’m pretty sure nobody wants to eat the stem end, yet there it is more than once. So. to start, I trim all the stem ends off and put them in the compost bin.
Cut each okra into 1/2″ pieces and soak in water for about 15 minutes. To bread them, lift them out of the water with a perforated spoon. Let the water drip as much as possible then add that to the bag. One tip is to fold the top of the bag down before you add each portion. Two or three spoons full is enough. Fold the bag up, seal it, and give the okra a good shake to coat very well in the mix. Let it rest for about a minute to ensure the flours stick, then carefully lift the okra out and place it on a rack on a sheet pan. The rack keeps the okra elevated off the pan so the breading doesn’t get soggy on the contact spot. It also makes freezing and bagging easier since they pop right off the rack.
Escoffier didn’t include fried okra in his book. One procedure that sounds interesting and is simple is to trim them, blanch them well, remove them, and let them drain a moment then finish cooking them in butter. Add a little cream sauce at the end and serve.
At the Governors Club, okra was sauteed with peeled, diced tomatoes as a vegetable with a grouper dish. It’s a good combination and can be done pretty quickly with not too much prep. And, no soaking the okra. Okra is probably most famous for the mucilage–mucus slime stuff–that comes out of it. The best way to avoid exposing the mucilage is to cook small okra whole. Like in a cream sauce or sauteed with tomatoes.
The best size is okra about the size of your finger, if your finger is closer in size to mine and not like Shaq or MJ. When okra get too big they get woody and nothing fixes that.
The last good use for okra is gumbo. I did an episode about okra a while back, episode 156, and on that show notes page included a gumbo recipe. I’ll add a link to that show notes page on this show notes page, culinarylibertarian.com/288.
Fried okra may be a Southern thing. I’ve never seen it served with a sauce. It is a bit like popcorn in that no matter how much you make it is never enough. Well-seasoned is best. No sauce is necessary.
