On Food and Cooking

beeswax, capable of receiving any impression
or effect, while most other vegetables
imposed their taste upon the dish. Today it’s
the most important leaf vegetable apart from
lettuce, valued for its rapid growth, mild
flavor, and tender texture when briefly
cooked. (Some varieties are tender when raw,
while thick-leaved varieties are chewy and
less suitable for salads.) When cooked, its
volume is reduced by about three-quarters.
Spinach has a high content of potentially
troublesome oxalates (p. 259), but it remains
an excellent source of vitamin A as well as of
phenolic antioxidants and compounds that
reduce potential cancer-causing damage to our
DNA. Folic acid was first purified from
spinach, which is our richest source of this
important vitamin (p. 255).
A number of unrelated but tender-leafed
plants are called spinach. Malabar spinach is
an Asian climber, Basella alba, notable for its
heat tolerance and the mucilaginous texture of