The Best Spinach Artichoke Dip

The school year is winding down, which means my juniors are panicking about their final essays and my seniors are pretending they have already graduated. This is the annual rhythm — thirty-seven Mays, thirty-seven cycles of the same beautiful, exhausting crescendo. I love May. I love the urgency of it, the way students who spent September claiming they hated reading are now arguing about the symbolism in Gatsby with a passion that suggests the book personally offended them. This is the goal. I don't need them to love literature. I need them to fight with it.

I am cooking more than usual, which Marvin finds alarming because "more than usual" for me is already what most people would call "professionally." But cooking is how I process the end of a school year — the grief of saying goodbye to seniors I have taught for two years, the pride of watching them walk into whatever comes next, the knowledge that some of them will remember what I taught them and most of them will remember me only as the woman who made them rewrite their thesis statements four times. Both are acceptable legacies.

This week I made rugelach — Sylvia's recipe, which I have been making since I was twelve years old and which I bring to the English department end-of-year meeting the way some people bring donuts. The rugelach is chocolate and cinnamon, rolled tight, baked until the edges are just past golden. My colleague Helen Marcowitz, who has been teaching math across the hall from me for twenty years, said, "Ruth, if you ever stop bringing these, I will retire." I said, "Helen, if you ever retire, I will bring them to your house." This is a binding agreement. We shook on it with sticky fingers.

I wrote a blog post this week about rugelach as a social contract — how the act of baking for others is a promise, a commitment to show up with sweetness even when the world is not sweet. I wrote about Sylvia rolling rugelach in the Grand Concourse kitchen while I sat at the table doing homework, how the smell of cinnamon and chocolate was the smell of my childhood, how I can time-travel by cracking an egg into flour and butter and beginning to roll. The post got twenty-three comments. One woman said she cried. I am collecting tears. It is, apparently, what my writing does. I am fine with this. Tears mean I reached something true.

Sophie smiled this week. Jennifer sent a photo. She looks like David, who looks like Irving, who looked like a man who pressed coats for a living and read the Times and loved his wife with a constancy I still marvel at. The genetics of this family are persistent. So is the rugelach.

But not everything I make is rugelach. Sometimes the thread that connects us is not cinnamon and chocolate but something warm and savory pulled from the oven, something a room full of people can lean into with torn bread and no pretense. I made this spinach artichoke dip the night Jennifer sent that photo of Sophie — because David was coming for dinner, and because I wanted something bubbling and golden on the table, something that said sit, stay, eat, we are still here. It is not Sylvia’s recipe. It is mine. And that, too, is a kind of inheritance.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 35 min | Total Time: 55 min | Servings: 12

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups heavy cream, half-and-half, or milk (see note)
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon coarse, kosher salt
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
8 ounces cream cheese, light or regular, softened
2 cans (15-ounce each) artichoke hearts, drained and coarsely chopped
1/2 to 1 teaspoon hot sauce, optional (but adds great flavor without making it spicy)
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1 to 1 1/2 cups freshly grated mozzarella or Monterey Jack cheese
10 to 16 ounces frozen chopped spinach, defrosted and squeezed dry

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 9X13-inch or similar sized baking dish.
Make the cream base. In a large microwave-safe bowl, whisk together the cream (or milk), flour, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Microwave the mixture in 1-minute intervals, whisking fully after each minute, until the mixture is thickened to the consistency of warm pudding, about 4-5 minutes.
Combine the filling. Stir in the cream cheese and mix until well-combined (it’s ok if there are a few lumps, but try to whisk it until as smooth as possible). Add the remaining ingredients; I like to add the spinach last, crumbling it in with my fingers to avoid large clumps. Mix well. Spread the dip into the prepared pan.
Bake and serve. Bake for 25-30 minutes until bubbling and golden on top. Serve warm with bread or tortilla chips.

Nutrition (per serving)

The Best Spinach Artichoke Dip — Because Some Things You Make to Prove They’re Still Yours