Photography: Elena Elisseeva - Fotolia.com
Spinach
An Arabian poet once sang of it as the “prince of all vegetables”. But in its new home in Europe his highness Spinacia olracea has by no means a lack of enthusiastic subjects.
A thousand and one great stories begin in the Orient. So too the story of spinach: Born in Persia, in the Middle Ages it found its way to Spain in the luggage of Arabian travellers and from there conquered the rest of Europe. Today it is mainly grown in Italy (
spinaci), France (
épinard) and Germany (
Spinat).
We can buy this leafy vegetable fresh year round. Once in our kitchen however, the freshness is gone within 24 hours. What it lacks in endurance in the fridge spinach makes up for with patience: It can be stored in a freezer for several months without a noticeable loss of quality. Incidentally, this cold detour into the cooking pot is taken by 85 percent of the overall spinach harvest.
Fresh picked summer spinach with its bitter-sweet, sweet-sour taste is magnificently suitable for salads. These provide a refined pleasure, for instance with Pancetta and orange or simply doused with ginger sauce as Chinese spinach salad. This method of preparation retains virtually all of its content of iron, potassium, vitamin C and provitamin A. Robust winter spinach, harvested later in the year – easily recognisable by its strong, wavy leaves – goes along with everything in the kitchen: It’s not just a dream partner for flash fried meat and fish, it also gives quiche that certain bit of green, can be festively baked in a ricotta-spinach pie, be eaten casually by hand as a puff pastry with spinach filling, can be fried with Soya sauce in a wok in just a few minutes and moreover makes a fine figure in spinach strudel. It’s juice colours the dough of green pasta, also unfolds its colourful side in aspic and sweets and bestows upon soups the appetite-stimulating colour of summer year round.
Comic hero Popeye’s green secret weapon should be very carefully washed to remove any remaining sand. Rough stems and spotted or yellow parts should be separated. Basic preparation is then as simple as can be: In a Miele steamer the leaves are done in just a few minutes, gently and right on time. In doing so they lose the better part of their volume, something to be considered while shopping. If spinach is only on the menu as a side dish, it demands hardly more than a pinch of salt and pepper. It can also be refined with nutmeg, cream or chopped garlic. When looking for spinach in haute cuisine it’s mostly found escorted by dishes labelled “à la florentine”.
