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Asparagus (Cut the stalks of equal length)
Cut the stalks of equal length as possible. Tie in a bunch. Boil in salted water twenty-five minutes.
Pour drawn butter over it.
Asparagus makes a nice dish cut into small pieces, and cook as you would green peas.
A bare-bones method from an era when green vegetables were cooked until entirely soft. Two things need attention: the boiling time and what "drawn butter" meant in 1900.
- Twenty-five minutes is far too longModern asparagus, thinner and far fresher than what a 1900 household bought, is done in 3-5 minutes for pencil spears and 6-8 for thick ones. Twenty-five minutes gives you olive-grey pulp. Test with a knife tip at the base of a stalk.
- Drawn butterIn American books of this period "drawn butter" usually means a simple flour-thickened butter sauce -- butter and flour cooked together, thinned with hot water or the asparagus liquor and seasoned -- not merely melted butter. Melted butter with lemon does the same job if you would rather skip the roux.
- Tying the bunchBundling keeps the stalks together so they can be lifted out in one piece; in some period practice the bunch was also stood upright so the tender tips steamed above the water while the woody bases boiled, though this recipe does not say so. Kitchen twine around the middle and again near the tips; stand them upright in a tall pot with two or three inches of water, or lay them flat and accept a slightly softer tip.
- Trimming rather than cutting to length"Equal length" is about even cooking, but the useful step is snapping or cutting off the fibrous end where the stalk stops being tender. Thick spring stalks also benefit from peeling the lower two inches.
- Salted waterSeason it properly -- about a tablespoon of salt per four quarts. Asparagus takes up very little salt in a few minutes' boiling.
- The second methodCut into inch lengths and cooked "as you would green peas" means simmered in a small amount of salted water, drained, and finished with butter. Five minutes is ample; the pieces are small.
- YieldReckon on a pound of asparagus for three people as a side dish, two if it is the centre of the plate.
Asparagus was a market-garden luxury with a genuinely short season, which is why nineteenth-century books give it its own entry and treat it with a sauce rather than folding it into something else. The bunch tied with twine, sold and cooked standing upright, was the standard commercial unit, and the tall narrow asparagus kettle was a recognised piece of kitchen equipment for households that could afford one. The long boiling time here reflects both older, thicker field-grown stalks and a general period preference for vegetables cooked through -- crisp-tender green vegetables are largely a twentieth-century taste. "Drawn butter" as a thickened sauce appears throughout American cookbooks from the mid-1800s onward and was the default dressing for boiled fish and vegetables alike, though the phrase has also long been used for plain melted butter.