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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Sure, it's good for you -- but it also tastes great.
Aug 12, 2004 | "I didn't know it was leafy until I grew up and left home," admits my friend Barbara, whose formative experience with spinach was the stringy creamed stuff her mother used to make.
"In the cartoons, Popeye squeezed a can of spinach. I loved that as a kid," confesses my friend Steve. "The can was cool. All my mother ever brought home were boxes of frozen spinach."
My own mother, notoriously not a good cook, was baffled by the vegetable. She tried cooking it with salt, pepper and a pat of butter -- and promptly went back to green beans (Del Monte's canned Blue Lake).
If there ever was a vegetable that could use some good P.R. -- maybe even a big advertising campaign -- it's spinach. Instead, its image is defined by Carl Rose's classic but disparaging 1928 New Yorker cartoon ("I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it") and by cookbooks that refer to it as "the broom of the stomach" or "the vitamin vegetable." For years, writes Bert Greene in "Greene on Greens," spinach, like all other greens, wasn't actually cooked in American kitchens; it was punished -- even in Hollywood. "What I do," Joan Crawford once explained, "is take boiling bacon grease and pour it over spinach until it sags." Plugs like these have given this misunderstood vegetable (Spinacia oleracea, to be precise) a tough, bitter, slimy, gritty, greasy, bland reputation.
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Worst of all, it's good for you.
Make that two P.R. agents and an advertising budget double that of those dancing California raisins. This is a vegetable in dire need of spin control.
Such was not always the case. The beginnings of spinach were certainly auspicious -- if a little loopy. It was first found growing wild near the desert of Dasht-e-Kavir in ancient Persia. It was named isfanakh, or "green hand," and it was cultivated (here's the loopy part) to satisfy the finicky appetite of Persian cats.
From there, the "Persian herb" traveled east, landing in China in the sixth century. It was planted alongside the rice fields, added to soups, and eventually exported as the "China flower" to India and Nepal. Some half-dozen centuries later, the Moors introduced it to Spain, and before long it was being eaten all over Western Europe -- especially during Lent, since it tended to be harvested just about then. It became a celebrated vegetable. The French even gave dishes made with spinach a fancy moniker: "florentine" -- in honor of Florence native Catherine de' Medici, who was said to have eaten spinach at every meal.
By the 17th century, there were at least 10 varieties of spinach being grown in Europe. (When even these 10 didn't prove sufficient and there was a paucity of spinach, cooks used turnip tops and beet greens -- spinach-style -- instead.) Then spinach came to the New World. Some say Columbus brought it. Others believe it came aboard the Mayflower. However it arrived, "it matters not a whit," says Bert Greene. Spinach was, he continues, "resolutely unpopular with settlers and natives alike." Greene even turned up an early Pilgrim prayer that called for protection from fire, famine, floods -- and "unclean foreign leaves" (i.e., spinach).
