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Asparagus with White Sauce
Pick the loose leaves from the heads, and scrape the stalks clean; wash well in very cold water; tie them up in bundles of about twenty in each, keeping all the heads turned the same way; cut the stalks even, leaving them about eight inches long.
Put the asparagus in hot water with a small handful of salt in it to boil about twenty minutes, and when done, drain carefully upon a napkin, to avoid breaking off the heads; dish them up on a square thick piece of toasted bread dipped in the water they have been boiled in. Cover with white sauce and serve.
A straightforward Victorian asparagus service, with one instruction that no modern cook should follow literally: the twenty-minute boil.
- The boiling timeTwenty minutes will reduce today's asparagus to grey mush. Thin spears need 2-4 minutes in boiling salted water, medium 4-6, thick peeled spears 6-8 — until a knife slips into the base with slight resistance. The original timing assumes much thicker, more mature stalks than most asparagus sold now.
- Scraping the stalksThis means peeling the lower half with a vegetable peeler or paring knife, worth doing only on spears thicker than a finger. Slender supermarket asparagus needs nothing but a snap or trim at the woody end.
- Tying in bundlesKitchen string around twenty spears, heads aligned, lets you lift the whole lot out at once without snapping the tips. Useful if you are cooking a large quantity; for a single bundle, a wide pan and a spider or tongs do the same work.
- "A small handful of salt"Read this as generously salted water — roughly 1 to 1.5 tablespoons per quart. The asparagus is in it briefly, so the water must be assertive to season at all.
- White sauceAn unspecified béchamel; a workable version is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Make it before the asparagus goes into the water, and keep it warm off direct heat.
- The toastA thick square of toast dipped in the cooking liquid acts as a sop for the sauce, the same logic as a trencher. Dip it briefly — a second per side — or it collapses. Toast it while the asparagus cooks.
- Draining on a napkinSound advice, and worth keeping. Lay the bundles on a clean towel rather than tipping them into a colander, where the heads break; blot the tops so the sauce is not thinned by water.
- YieldBundles of twenty spears each serve roughly four people as a side dish, or two as a light course on toast. One cup of white sauce is enough for two bundles.
Asparagus served on soaked toast under a white sauce is a very old English and American service, and the buttered-toast base is often traced to the general trencher tradition, in which a slice of bread caught the sauce and juices, and was eaten last. Nineteenth-century asparagus was a brief, expensive luxury — a spring crop with no refrigerated transport behind it — which is why cookbooks of this period take such care with the tying, the alignment of the heads and the careful draining. The large spears of this recipe, trimmed to eight inches, genuinely wanted peeling and longer cooking than the thin green asparagus that dominates markets now, which is the main reason a modern cook should ignore this book's twenty minutes. The recipe's silence on how to make the white sauce is also telling: béchamel was assumed knowledge, and books of the era generally seem to have referred to it as if it were an ingredient.