Spinach au Grappin

I would have liked to have published this much sooner, but life got so that it felt as though I was being shot by all sides, but here it is now. By now, in 68, most workers were returning to work, and tomorrow marks the day when the Sorbonne was back in the hands of the authorities. 

SPINACH AU GRAPPIN

Ingredients: 1 kg spinach, 100 g[rams] of grated gruyere, 50 g of melted butter, 4 eggs, red pepper to taste.

Remove the stems from the leaves. Wash the leaves several times, then boil them in salted water, uncovered, for a quarter of an hour (around 2 litres of water for 1 kg of spinach). Drain. Squeeze, sift and arrange spinach. The water must be salted 10 g per litre.

Mix the spinach with the grated gruyere. Pour the valor of the 50 g of melted butter on the plate. Put in a pre-heated oven for 10 minutes. In the style of an urbanist, empty 4 eggs, previously poached, on the plate from the oven. Garnish with red pepper.

There is a footnote for this recipe which is :

Pierre Grappin, Dean of the College at Nanterre, nicknamed Grappin-the-Bludgeon after allowing the police to intervene on campus on 26 January 1968.

This is the recipe as it appears on the Not Bored website, who also translated it. I am not able to see the original French version, and I am not sure why the name of the recipe is 'Spinach' and not Epinard, and I don't know if the French version would reveal anything. I am also not sure of the word 'valour', as it doesn't seem to be a cookery term, but anyone with answers to those two queries would be very welcome to comment. 

A menu set out like this is now seen as old fashioned, where the starter, fish course, meat course and vegetable course are all served separately, but would have been normal to Debord. It's certainly old fashioned now to boil spinach for fifteen minutes. In Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking there is a rather humorous recipe which involves cooking spinach for five consecutive days, and of course nowadays the idea of cooking spinach for more than a couple of minutes is ludicrous. But that's fashion.

This, above, is the finished result. Before I thought about making these recipes I'd never poached an egg in my life, and I thought it was something difficult. It's actually the simplest thing to do, although I think the word 'meh' was invented to comment on a poached egg. And while I have been talking about old fashioned things, I felt old fashioned as I realised that red pepper is no longer available in shops, or maybe it is just called cayenne or paprika, unlike in the 1960s when pepper was either red or white. 

There weren't any massive revelations during this one, there wasn't much at all except haste, as once you start cooking it's very quick, which is probably like revolution.