Popeye's spinach
Marika Hanbury-Tenison
The Victorians stuffed their children so full of spinach, usually overcooked and swimming in water, because it would 'do them good' that it is little wonder their children left the nursery vowing they would never eat spinach again. In fact the vegetable became so unpopular that by the 1920s it was almost dying out in this country and Good King Henry, a cultivated plant similar to spinach and once a feature of every cottage garden, went completely out of fashion. Then came Popeye the Sailor Man. Remember him and his weedy girlfriend Olive Oil, and the amazing effect a little spinach had on his muscles and sex life? One can of the stuff and pipe-smoking Popeye would have made Steven Austin look like a weakling; a second can and Olive stopped making eyes at the black-bearded baddie and rushed back into the arms of her true love.
By the 1940s Popeye and spinach were synonymous and as a child I remember being taken in by my nanny's assurance that if I ate it up properly I would grow big and strong like the sailor. At the age of eight I really fancied a pair of bulging biceps and it.
wasn't until about ten years later that I finally resigned myself to looking like Olive instead. My dedication to spinach, however, in all its many forms, remained and I now grow all six varieties in my kitchen garden, harvesting the leaves all the year round, shredding them, cooking them en branche, pureeing them,, using them as a colouring ingredient and using them for a salad in place of lettuee.
Spinach, by the way, really is good for you — providing it is not overcooked, the leaves contain a high level of iron and potassium. If you happen to be lacking in these things a delicious alternative to a Bloody Mary can be made by saving the water the spinach has been cooked in, reducing and cooling it and then doctoring your drink in the usual way with pepper, celery salt, Worcestershire sauce and a few drops of tabasco — an excellent cocktail for anyone inclined to be anaemic. Like most good things, however, it also has its dangers: too much of the vegetable, and I do mean really large quantities, can be a contributory cause of kidney stones due to its oxalic acid content. In fact our hero Popeye was banned from New Zealand because the oxalic acid content was supposed to be high in the tinned produce. True, Spinach can be a bit difficult to grow, with the summer variety (Long Standing Round) disliking hot, dry weather, and the winter variety turning up its toes if subjected to too much wet or cold. Far more hardy is spinach beet, often known as perpetual spinach, which grows all the year. round, thrives on being cut for the kitchen and has crisp, green leaves.
Seakale beet also comes in the spinach category as its leaves are used in the same way, but here the advantage is that you can use the thick white stems as well. Trim off the green leaves from the ribs and use them as a substitute for spinach; you can tie the ribs into bundles, cook them in boiling, salted water until just tender and serve them as you would asparagus with melted butter or a Hollandaise sauce.
In Italy, where some of my favourite dishes come from, spinach is an important ingredient for a large number of traditional dishes. Layers of spinach and cheese or a cheese sauce play their part in many lasagne and cannelloni recipes, spinach and ricotta cheese are used as a stuffing for tortellini, crespelli and ravioli or for making gnocchi. Spinach combines with pasta to make the fresh green tagliatelle verdi or lasagne verdi and the spinach/cheese combination is the base for all those beautifully simple Florentine dishes. Eggs Florentine is perhaps the most famous but the dish can equally well be made with poached fillets of cod, sole, plaice or with lightly fried scallops; also with thickly cut cooked gammon or with cooked chicken.
As lettuces are still expensive and scarce unless you grow them under glass, try using spinach instead. Wash and shred the leaves and combine them with sliced raw mushrooms, some bacon — fried and chopped — and a vinaigrette dressing.
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