Spinach Spinacia oleracea
A kilogram wilts to a handful. Squeeze it dry or it waters down whatever it lands in.
7 recipes on this site
In the kitchen
Under heat
A full bag wilts to almost nothing in under a minute — the leaves are mostly water and the structure collapses fast.
Against air
Cut or bruised leaves brown at the edges within hours; whole, unwashed leaves hold much longer.
In storage
Store it dry, wrapped loosely, with a paper towel to catch condensation — trapped moisture is what turns a bag slimy.
At the shop
Look at the stems, not just the leaves. Wilted stems mean the whole bunch is already past its best, even if the leaves still look green.
Which variety, for what
- Baby spinach
- Tender enough to eat raw; wilts almost instantly if cooked.
- Mature / savoy spinach
- Tougher, crinkled leaves that hold up better to sautéing and longer cooking.
Beyond the kitchen
THE DECIMAL POINT MYTH
The story that spinach's iron content was overstated tenfold by a misplaced decimal point is itself false — it was traced to a 1981 article and has no earlier source. Spinach does contain iron; the famous error never happened. It remains one of the most cited examples of a fact that is not one.
POPEYE
Popeye began eating spinach in 1929 and is credited by growers with a substantial rise in American consumption through the 1930s. Crystal City, Texas, erected a statue to him in 1937 in explicit thanks.
THE SQUEAK
That chalky, teeth-coating feeling after eating spinach is oxalic acid crystals, the same compound behind rhubarb leaf's bitterness. Blanching and discarding the water removes a good deal of it, which is why old recipes insist on it.
FLORENTINE
Any dish labelled à la florentine contains spinach, a convention attributed to Catherine de' Medici, who is supposed to have brought Florentine cooks and a fondness for spinach to the French court in 1533. The attribution is traditional rather than documented.
A longer history
Spinach originated in Persia and was cultivated there by at least the fourth century. It travelled east to China in the seventh century, where it was recorded as the Persian vegetable, and west through the Arab conquest of North Africa and Spain, arriving in Europe around the eleventh or twelfth century.
It was valued in medieval and early modern Europe partly because it grows in cool weather and was available in early spring when little else was, and partly because it was permitted during Lent. Spanish and Moorish cooking treated it seriously long before northern Europe did.
Its modern reputation was shaped as much by advertising as by agriculture. The Popeye cartoons of the 1930s coincided with a measurable rise in American spinach consumption, and the twentieth-century association of spinach with strength and virtue — and with children being made to eat it — is largely a product of that period rather than anything older.
