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Ambushed Asparagus
1 Cut off the tender tops of fifty heads of asparagus; boil and drain them. Have ready as many stale biscuits or rolls as there are persons to be served, from which you have cut a neat top slice and scooped out the inside. Set them in the oven to crisp, laying the tops beside them, that all may dry together. Meanwhile put into a sauce-pan a sugarless custard made as follows: A pint or less of milk, and four well-whipped eggs; boil the milk first, then beat in the eggs; set over the fire and stir till it thickens, when add a table-spoon of butter, and season with salt and pepper. Into this custard put the asparagus, minced fine. Do not let it boil, but remove from the fire as soon as the asparagus is fairly in. Fill the rolls with the mixture, put on the tops, fitting them carefully; set in the oven three minutes, after which arrange on a dish. To be eaten hot.
A savory custard folded with asparagus and served in hollowed rolls — the "ambush" is the bread case hiding the filling. Two things decide whether it works: the custard must thicken without curdling, and the bread must be dry enough to hold it.
- The hinge: never boil the custardFour eggs in a pint of milk sets at around 175-180F. Keep the pan over low heat, stir constantly, and pull it the moment it coats the spoon; once it simmers the eggs scramble and weep. Beating the eggs into the hot milk in a thin stream, rather than dumping them in, avoids curdling at the start.
- "Sugarless custard"In nineteenth-century usage "custard" most often implied a sweetened egg-and-milk mixture, so "sugarless" most likely signals to the cook that this one is savory rather than naming an ingredient. Read it as a stirred custard seasoned only with butter, salt and pepper.
- Oven for drying the casesThe original gives no temperature or time. A gentle oven, roughly 325F for 10-15 minutes, will dry the shells and their lids through without browning them. Bread that is still soft inside will collapse into the custard.
- Stale biscuits or rollsIn an American book of this period "biscuits" are soft quick breads or small soft raised rolls, not cookies. Day-old dinner rolls or crusty round buns about 3 inches across work; scoop them leaving a wall about a half inch thick.
- Asparagus timingOnly the tender tips are used, and they need 3-4 minutes in salted boiling water, no more, since they go on to be minced and warmed again. Drain them very well or the water will thin the custard.
- YieldFifty asparagus tips with a pint (or less) of milk and four eggs will fill something like half a dozen rolls, but the recipe sets no number: it asks only for one roll per person. Scale the custard to the company.
- The final three minutesThis is only to heat the filled rolls through, not to bake them. The original names no temperature; a hot oven for three minutes is enough, and longer risks the custard setting hard and splitting.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) belongs to the era when asparagus was a brief and prized spring vegetable, and this recipe reflects a genteel table's instinct to dress it up rather than simply butter it. Recipes of this kind circulated widely, and versions of the dish appear in other household books of the period. Serving a creamed filling in a hollowed, crisped bread case was a common device of the time -- the same idea appears under names like croustades and "bread cups" -- and it let a cook stretch a costly ingredient while producing something that looked composed on the platter. The playful title is of a piece with other jokingly named dishes in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s; here the asparagus lies in wait inside its roll. The stirred savory custard also shows how loosely the word custard was used: it named a technique, thickening milk with eggs, and the sugar was optional.