Asparagus Soup
40 heads asparagus 3 tablespoonfuls flour 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 cupful cream 1 quart white stock 1 bunch herbs 1 bay leaf 4 sprigs parsley 2 egg yolks 1 blade mace Salt and white pepper to taste 1 onion Take heads off asparagus, and put aside. Cut up stalks in slices, also onion, put these into saucepan with Crisco, herbs, parsley, bay leaf, and mace, and fry gently for fifteen minutes, add flour, then stock, and simmer slowly for 1 1/2 hours. Rub through sieve, add cream, yolks of eggs, and seasonings, reheat, but take care not to boil soup. Just before serving throw in asparagus tops, which should be first cooked in a little boiling stock.
A classic velvet-style soup thickened twice, once with a flour roux and again with egg yolks and cream. The whole dish hinges on the second thickening.
- Do not let it boil after the yolks go inOnce the yolk-and-cream liaison is added, hold the soup between 160 and 175F. A boil will scramble the yolks and leave a grainy soup that no amount of sieving will rescue.
- "40 heads asparagus"A "head" here means a single spear, not the tip alone. Two ordinary supermarket bunches, about 2 lb, will do; the recipe then has you separate tips from stalks.
- CriscoThe book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote it. Three tablespoons of butter gives a better flavour in a soup this delicate, though butter is only about 80 per cent fat, so the roux will thicken a little less.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones blanched rather than roasted, so the finished soup stays pale. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical stand-in; avoid dark or brown broths, which muddy the colour.
- Bunch of herbs and blade of maceThe "bunch of herbs" is a bouquet garni, thyme and parsley stalks tied with a bay leaf. A blade of mace is a strip of the outer covering of nutmeg; a small pinch of ground mace is a rough equivalent. Remove the bouquet before sieving.
- The simmering timeNinety minutes is longer than needed with modern trimmed asparagus and will flatten the flavour. Forty to forty-five minutes extracts everything worth having from the stalks.
- SievingA blender or immersion blender does this work in a minute, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve afterward: asparagus stalks carry tough fibres that no blender fully breaks down.
- The tipsCook them separately in a little stock for two to three minutes only, until just tender, and add them at the last moment. Simmered with the soup they go grey and limp.
- YieldSomewhere between a quart and five cups depending on how far it reduces during the simmer; four as a first course.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that flourished in the early twentieth century: the branded recipe collection, written to persuade cooks that a new manufactured product could stand in for the fats they already knew. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, appeared in 1911, and books like this one placed it in every recipe it could plausibly occupy, including a French-style cream soup where butter had always been the fat of choice. The soup itself is older than the shortening by a long way. It follows the pattern of a purée finished with a liaison of egg yolks and cream, a technique standard in nineteenth-century professional kitchens and passed into English and American household cookery through writers who had absorbed the French repertoire. The separate treatment of tips and stalks reflects a period when asparagus was a brief seasonal luxury and no part of the spear was wasted: the woody lower stalks went to flavour the base, the tender tips were kept whole for the bowl.