Creamed Spinach

Creamed spinach is yet another essential in the (especially Southern) American Thanksgiving menu. This recipe is actually two in one, so, rather than repeating the whole text of the second recipe here, I’ll simply provide a link to it when the time comes, and I’ll follow that with any modifications this recipe needs over that one.

Spinach—and most leafy greens— cooks down to an incredibly small volume relative to how much was in your pan to begin with. You need about 3-4 ounces of dry spinach (60-80% of the volume of a typical 5 oz package. For those in the metric system, that’s about 60-80% of a 140-gram package) per person. Most of this mass is water trapped inside the cells of the spinach, and when you sauté the spinach, most of that liquid will be boiled off, thereby losing all that volume, but, at the same time, concentrating the flavor of the spinach.

Before you start sauteing the spinach, mince or press 3 cloves of garlic and slice one onion into half-moons (cut the onion through the stem and the root; cut off the stem; make thin slices parallel to the root until you reach it; repeat this for the other half of the onion; your slices should look like a bunch of copies of the letter “C” made out of onion). Sweat out the onions over medium heat, then add the garlic. Make sure the onions go in first so that the garlic doesn’t burn. “Sweating” for onions means “cooking just to drive off moisture until the onions turn translucent, but no further.” If you go any further than this, you’ll start getting jammy, golden-brown, sweeter onions. These are very good in certain contexts (that’s exactly what you want for French onion soup, which I’ll probably write a recipe for in the winter at some point, and if I do, those words will become a hyperlink to that recipe), but not here. Here, caramelizing onions messes with the texture, color, and flavors we want in this side dish, so if they get caramelized, unfortunately, throw the onions away or use them for something else—they aren’t useful here.

At this point, start making a mornay sauce. Make a béchamel by following this recipe from my Mother Sauces series from early October. Turn it into a mornay by melting in a freshly grated well-melting cheese, like a white cheddar, gruyère, or gouda. Grate in as much cheese as you would like, and whisk to melt and properly emulsify. Industrially pre-shredded or pre-grated cheeses won’t work for this. They have too many emulsifiers and stabilizers that chemically alter the taste and texture too much when melted to work well in a mornay.

Once the onions and garlic have sweated out and become fragrant, add a touch more olive oil to your pan and place in the spinach (4-5 people need a pound of raw spinach. Scale that up or down according to your family’s needs.).Cook out the spinach until it wilts and most of the moisture in it evaporates away. Let it cool in the pan in which it was cooked. Once it is at room temperature, remove as much more moisture as possible by running it through a salad spinner. Once you have removed as much moisture as possible, return your spinach to the same pan (which you have now dried) and ladle in as much mornay as you would like.