French (food idiom) Fridays: mettre du beurre dans les épinards
(and a recipe for Quiche Florentine)
mettre du beurre dans les épinards = to improve one’s financial situation
what does the expression “mettre du beurre dans les épinards” mean and where does it come from?
This expression in English literally translates to “putting butter in the spinach”. Butter is often associated with rich-foods and, subsequently, foods enjoyed by the wealthy. Adding butter to spinach (not typically associated with wealth) makes life a little better, more palatable.1 So it is a bit like “making ends meet”.
One of the first times this expression was seen in literature was in the play Les Bourgeois Campagnards (1834)2 where it was used to imply that marrying above one’s social rank would, indeed, mettre du beurre dans les épinards - or improve one’s living situation.
All I know it that growing up, spinach was definitely not may favourite but the addition of butter made it better! When I teach kids to cook with spinach, they are always amazed at HOW MUCH we put in and then HOW MUCH it cooks down (thankfully, according to some of them LOL!).
et maintenant, à table!
This month’s recipe is a simple quiche (even more simple if you use a pre-made pie crust!) that uses frozen spinach so you can make it year-round. I like to buy frozen spinach and have it on hand in my freezer because it is more economical for me - when I buy fresh spinach, unless I am making a recipe that uses it all, I always find myself with leftover small quantities that are hard to use up OR it sits in the crisper, forgotten until it’s no good to use anymore. Frozen, chopped spinach is easy to measure out the exact quantity that you need for a recipe!
For this recipe, I made my own pastry shell but you can totally use a store-bought pie crust.
With thanks to my friend Sydney for allowing me to
Bring a little something to eat along to a drinks “do”
Take over her kitchen to heat and plate this
Use her lovely plates to take photos
This was a lovely light supper along with a green salad - it had definitely deflated by the time we got to eating it, it was lovely and puffy when it came out of the oven.
The great thing about quiche is that it is delicious hot, warm or even cold (I love me some cold quiche as a post-run refuel!).
This one is so pretty and screams SPRING (which we hope is coming here after it teased us with a few beautiful days a couple of weeks ago!).
get the recipe!
Grab the printable recipe by clicking on the blue button!
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Thanks for reading! Until next time!
Mardi
xo
via Expressio.fr
Love this Mardi! Always so clever.
Bonjour: vous avez un substack rigolo et utile. J'essaye toujours de mettre du beurre dans mes epinards! Et en plus vous vivez pres de Toulouse, une ville que j'aime beaucoup. Aie le cassoulet.
Je vais enseigner French for Cooks dans un organisme du coin, et je ferai circuler votre substack. J'ecris des livres de cuisine (en français et en anglais..)