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Asparagus
Boil 2 cups asparagus tips in salted water 15 minutes, then drain them; while they are cooking put 1 cup milk in double boiler, and when boiling pour some of it on 2 lightly beaten eggs, stirring vigorously meanwhile, then put eggs into double boiler with milk, and stir until it begins to thicken. Add 1 teaspoon Crisco, salt and pepper to taste, and remove from fire. Cut asparagus tips into 1/2 inch pieces and add them to sauce. Take 6 stale rolls, cut off tops, remove inside, let them dry in oven; when crisp and hot fill each with asparagus in sauce, replace tops and serve.
A custard sauce bound with egg rather than flour, served in hollowed bread cases. The two things worth adjusting are the asparagus time and the heat under the eggs.
- Fifteen minutes is too longModern asparagus tips are tender in 2-4 minutes in boiling salted water, less if thin. Fifteen minutes gives you grey, collapsing spears; the longer time probably suits thicker, coarser stalks than are usual now. Drain and refresh briefly in cold water to hold the colour if the sauce is not ready.
- The sauce is a custard, not a bechamelThere is no flour here, so the egg alone does the thickening. Keep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer and stir constantly; the sauce is ready when it coats the spoon, around 170-175F. Past that it curdles and no amount of beating brings it back.
- TemperingPouring hot milk onto the beaten eggs while stirring is the whole trick, and the instruction is worth following exactly. Add the milk in a thin stream, not a splash.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in the 1910s and the reason this book exists. A teaspoon of butter does the same job here and tastes better; the fat is for gloss and richness, not structure.
- Stale rollsFirm, close-crumbed dinner rolls or small crusty rolls a day or two old. Cut the tops off, hollow them leaving a wall about half an inch thick, and dry them in a low oven until crisp; the recipe specifies no temperature or time. Brushing the insides with melted butter first helps keep the sauce from soaking through.
- Timing the assemblyFill the cases at the last moment. A custard sauce sitting in bread will soften it, so the cases are best not filled in advance.
- YieldSix filled rolls, which is a light supper or lunch dish for three, or a first course for six.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that was really an advertisement: it was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company brought to market in 1911, and its recipes find places for the product even where a spoonful of butter would be more natural. That is why a delicate egg-and-milk sauce here ends with a teaspoon of shortening. The dish itself is an older idea than the book — hollowed bread cases, sometimes called croustades, were one nineteenth-century way to serve a creamed vegetable or minced meat without pastry, and they had the practical virtue of using up rolls that had gone stale. Asparagus in the period was a spring luxury with a short season, tinned for the rest of the year, and stretching two cups of tips across six servings with a custard sauce is exactly the kind of economy these books were written to teach.