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Asparagus with Butter Sauce
Untie the bunches, wash and remove scales. Cut off the hard part of spears as far up as they will snap. Retie, and cook in boiling salted water until tender (about fifteen minutes), leaving the tips out of water the first ten minutes of cooking. Drain, remove strings. Arrange in hot serving dish and pour over two tablespoons melted butter (for each bunch), sprinkle with salt and pepper.
A plain treatment that depends almost entirely on not overcooking. The one thing to change is the timing.
- Fifteen minutes is too longAsparagus sold today is generally thinner and younger than the thick market grass this book assumes. Pencil spears need 2-3 minutes in boiling water, medium spears 4-5, and genuinely thick ones 6-8. Test with a knife tip at the base of the stalk rather than watching the clock.
- Why the tips are held out of the waterThe stalk cooks slower than the head, and keeping the tips above the waterline for the first ten minutes (which implies standing the tied bunch upright in a deep pan) lets them steam rather than boil. It works, but with modern thin spears the difference is small enough that laying them flat in a wide pan is easier and more even.
- Retying the bunchKitchen twine around the stalks, one loop near the butts and one below the tips, keeps them upright and lets you lift the whole lot out at once. Remove the strings before dressing, as the recipe says, or they end up on the plate.
- Scales and snappingThe scales are the small triangular leaves along the stalk, which trap grit; rub them off under running water. Snapping finds the point where the fibre gives, but it is wasteful on thick spears -- peeling the lower two inches with a vegetable peeler saves more of the stalk.
- Salting the waterAbout a tablespoon of salt per quart. Salting the water seasons the spears more evenly than salt sprinkled on at the end.
- A bunch, and how many it feedsA modern market bunch runs roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb, which serves three or four as a side dish; period bunches were not standardised and were often heavier. Two tablespoons of butter per bunch is modest, and three would not be excessive.
- Drain thoroughlyWater clinging to the spears will thin the butter into a puddle. Lift the bunch out, stand it butts-down on a towel for half a minute, then arrange it in the hot dish.
Asparagus was the classic marker of the American spring table: before refrigerated freight and Peruvian imports, asparagus meant April and May and nothing else. The upright cooking method here -- stalks in water, tips in steam -- was standard enough in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that manufacturers sold tall, narrow asparagus kettles with wire baskets for the purpose, and it survives in the modern practice of steaming spears bundled upright in a stockpot. The long fifteen-minute boil reflects a market crop grown for thick, fibrous stalks and often harvested larger than today's, when tenderness rather than heft is prized; "grass," the old greengrocer's term for asparagus, is still occasionally heard in Britain.