I didn't know it was leafy until I grew up and left home," admits my friend Barbara, whose formative experience with spinach was the stringy creamed stuff her mother used to make. 
  

"In the cartoons, Popeye squeezed a can of spinach. I loved that as a kid," confesses my friend Steve. "The can was cool. All my mother ever brought home were boxes of frozen spinach." 
  

My own mother, notoriously not a good cook, was baffled by the vegetable. She tried cooking it with salt, pepper, and a pat of butter—and promptly went back to green beans (Del Monte's canned Blue Lake).
  

If there ever was a vegetable that could use some good P.R.—maybe even a big advertising campaign—it's spinach. Instead, its image is defined by Carl Rose's classic but disparaging 1928 New Yorker cartoon ("I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it") and by cookbooks that refer to it as "the broom of the stomach" or "the vitamin vegetable". For years, writes Bert Greene in Greene on Greens, spinach, like all greens, wasn't actually cooked in American kitchens; it was punished—even in Hollywood. "What I do," Joan Crawford once explained, "is take boiling bacon grease and pour it over spinach until it sags." Plugs like these have given this misunderstood vegetable (Spinacia oleracea, to be precise) a tough, bitter, slimy, gritty, greasy, bland reputation.
  

Worst of all, it's good for you.
  

Make that two P.R. agents and an advertising budget double that of those dancing California raisins. This is a vegetable in dire need of spin control.
  

Such was not always the case. The beginnings of spinach were certainly auspicious—if a little loopy. It was first found growing wild near the desert of Dasht-e-Kavir in ancient Persia. It was named isf