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Asparagus Tips in Croustades
Prepare the asparagus in the usual way, cut off the tops one inch in length. Cook in as little boiling salted water as possible. Drain and dress with a Béchamel Sauce. Serve in Bread Croustades (small round, square, or diamond-shaped molds cut through thick slices of bread). 4 tablespoons butter. 4 tablespoons flour.
A June side dish built on two things the original assumes you already know: how to hollow and crisp a bread case, and how to build the sauce from the butter and flour listed at the end. Both are worth spelling out.
- The croustadesThe original leaves the method out entirely. Cut rounds, squares or diamonds (about 2 inches across works) from bread sliced thickly -- around 1 1/2 inches -- then hollow the centres to leave walls and a floor roughly 1/4 inch thick. Brush inside and out with melted butter and bake in a moderately hot oven, about 375F, for 10-12 minutes until dry and pale gold; they can also be fried in deep fat at the same heat for about a minute. Day-old firm white bread hollows far more cleanly than fresh.
- The unlisted milkThe bare "4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour" is the Béchamel base. That ratio takes about 2 cups of milk for a sauce thick enough to coat asparagus tips without running out of the cases. Cook the roux a minute or two without colouring, add the milk gradually, and simmer until it just holds a line on the spoon.
- Asparagus timingOne-inch tips need 3 to 4 minutes in boiling salted water, not the long boiling older books often imply. "As little water as possible" is deliberate: it keeps the flavour in the pan rather than the sink, and the tips should still have some spine when drained.
- Use the stalksCutting off only the top inch leaves most of the spear behind. Peel and simmer the tender portions and add them to soup, or cook and puree them into the Béchamel itself for a green sauce.
- Dry before dressingDrain the tips well and let the steam come off for a moment. Wet asparagus thins the sauce and softens the croustades from the inside within a few minutes.
- Season the sauceA period Béchamel was often built on a milk infused with onion, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns, then strained. If you skip that, at minimum salt it properly and add white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg; unseasoned white sauce over asparagus tastes of nothing but flour.
- Yield and timingThe original gives no quantity of asparagus and no yield. Two pounds of asparagus with this quantity of sauce will fill roughly eight to ten croustades, enough for four to six as a side course. Fill at the last moment and serve at once.
Croustades belong to a long habit in French cookery of giving a soft, saucy filling an edible container: bread cases, puff-pastry vol-au-vents, rice borders and pastry timbales all did the same work at a time when serving was done at the table from platters rather than plated in the kitchen. Asparagus was a genuinely seasonal luxury; forced and imported spears existed but were expensive, and the local crop arrived in late spring and ended around midsummer. The Béchamel is attributed to a steward of Louis XIV's court named Béchameil, though that attribution is repeated more often than it is documented. By 1900 American cookbooks treated it as little more than a well-seasoned white sauce, and it turned up over nearly every boiled vegetable on the table.