 Classic spinach salad | |
| Type | Salad |
|---|---|
| Course | Main dish or side dish |
| Serving temperature | Room temperature or warm |
| Main ingredients | Spinach |
Spinach salad is a salad withspinach as its main ingredient. In the US, a version dressed in a hot bacon dressing which slightly wilts the spinach was popular in the 1970s and into the 1980s and has been called the classic version.
Versions exist inPersian,Georgian, andChinese cuisines, and a US version in the early 1900s used cooked spinach in amolded salad.
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Common additional ingredients includetomatoes,eggs,cheese, sliveredalmonds,walnuts and/or fresh or dried berries, such as cranberry orstrawberry. Spinach salad and its various recipes is possibly one of the favorite salads for many. Spinach salad is classically served with a warmbacon orvinaigrette dressing, but variations are endless.[1][2]
The salad can be served as a main dish or a side dish.[3][4] The classic version with hot bacon dressing is typically served warm; it was developed with mature spinach as the main ingredients, but as baby spinach became available in supermarkets it became more widely used in the dish.[5] A 1983New York Times recipe byFlorence Fabricant using mature spinach called for the spinach to be washed, dried, and torn into pieces before dressing.[6]
Spinach salad's popularity likely arose because spinach is one of the earliest of salad greens to emerge in the spring intemperate climates.[7][8] Before long-distance shipping of refrigerated produce became common, those living in climates where leafy greens were not available year around eagerly anticipated the appearance of perishable early greens such as spinach and asparagus. Spinach emerges beforedandelion greens, which were a traditional European early-spring salad green also often dressed with a hot bacon dressing, particularly in Germany.[9][10]The New York Times'Melissa Clark noted that the appearance of baby spinach in supermarkets, eliminating the need for time-consuming rinsing, de-stemming, and chopping of the mature leaves, increased her willingness to treat the dish as a weeknight dinner option.[5]
Saveur,Southern Living,The New York Times, andTheKitchn called the hot-bacon-dressed spinach salad a classic.[9][11][12][5]
Spanakit is a spinach salad withPersian origins; its name refers to thePersian wordaspanakh, or spinach.[13][14][15] According toJoan Nathan it is "a very old recipe".[13][14] The dish contains ground spinach and ground nuts.[13][14]
InDongbei, China, a salad of blanched spinach and peanuts is common and traditionally served as an appetizer.[16]
Ispanakhi Matsvnit is aGeorgian salad of cooked and mincedspinach mixed withyoghurt.[17]
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According toAlton Brown, a spinach salad dressed in warm bacon dressing likely originated among thePennsylvania Dutch.[8][10] Variations of the salad with a hot bacon dressing, also calledwilted spinach salad, became popular in the 1970s in the United States and often included cannedmandarin oranges,blue cheese and hard-boiled eggs.[18][7] The spinach salad with hot bacon dressing remained popular into the 1980s but by the early 2000s had fallen out of style; according toWolfgang Puck writing in 2010, "You practically have to send out a search party to find one in fine restaurants these days." Puck speculated that the salad had become so ubiquitous that "people burned out on it".[7]
Recipes for spinach salad at the start of the 20th century were quite different from modern versions; rather than a fresh salad the dish was amolded salad made from cooked spinach.[19]
