Cut tough ends from the asparagus; scrape and boil in salted water until tender. Make a cream sauce. When done, stir in the yolk of an egg; season with a little white pepper. The sauce must be rather thick and poured hot over the asparagus. Serve with veal chops.
June 19 — No. 19
English
A late-Victorian style vegetable dish that assumes you already know how to make a cream sauce. The whole thing hinges on the egg yolk: it thickens and enriches, but it will scramble if the sauce is boiling when it goes in.
- The egg yolkTake the sauce off the heat, temper the yolk with a spoonful or two of the hot sauce, then stir it back in and hold it below a simmer. Once the yolk is in, the sauce must not boil or it will curdle into threads.
- "Make a cream sauce"The recipe assumes knowledge the book does not supply. A plain flour-and-milk sauce is the usual reading: roughly 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and 1 cup milk, or half milk and half cream, cooked a few minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Whatever the route, it should coat a spoon heavily before the yolk goes in, since the recipe insists the sauce be "rather thick."
- Boiling the asparagusMany nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks gave asparagus fifteen to twenty minutes, sometimes longer. Modern spears want 3-5 minutes in well-salted water for medium thickness, until a knife slips into the stem base with slight resistance. Overcooked asparagus turns olive-drab and collapses under a heavy sauce.
- ScrapingWorth doing on thick spears with woody skin below the tip; a vegetable peeler from just under the head downward. Thin spring spears do not need it — snap or trim the ends and leave them alone.
- White pepper, not blackWhite pepper keeps the sauce unspeckled, and a period that judged a cream sauce partly on its whiteness generally called for it in preference to black.
- DrainingLift the spears out and let them drain properly, on a cloth or a rack, before saucing. Water clinging to the stalks will thin the sauce on the plate and defeat the instruction that it be "rather thick."
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; about a pound of asparagus with a sauce of the size above would serve four as a side. The recipe's veal chops can be substituted with any plain roast or sauteed white meat, which leaves the sauce as the only rich element on the plate.
Asparagus under a rich egg-thickened cream sauce was standard English country-house cookery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when asparagus was a brief, expensive, jealously guarded crop from walled kitchen gardens — cut for a few weeks in late spring and early summer. The pairing with veal is characteristic of the era's plate-building: a pale meat, a pale sauce and a green vegetable, arranged for the eye as much as the palate. Books of this type, which ran a dish a day and labelled each with a nationality, were aimed at the middle-class housekeeper who wanted variety without a full culinary education; the national labels are often loose.