Asparagus Soup
Cut the tops from about thirty heads of asparagus, about half an inch long, and boil the rest; cut off all the tender portions and rub through a sieve, adding a little salt; warm three pints soup stock, add a small lump of butter and a tea-spoon of flour previously cooked by heating the butter and slowly stirring in the flour; then add the asparagus pulp. Boil slowly a quarter of an hour, stirring in two or three table-spoons cream; color the soup with a tea-spoon of prepared spinach, made by pounding the spinach well, adding a few drops of water, squeezing the juice through a cloth and putting it over a good fire. As soon as it looks curdy, take it off, and strain the liquor through a sieve. What remains on the sieve is to be used for coloring the soup. Just before serving soup, add the asparagus tops which have been separately boiled.
A classic cream-of-asparagus in the French manner, thickened barely at all and tinted with spinach green. The instructions are compressed; a few of the quantities need unpacking.
- "Thirty heads" means thirty spearsHead here is a whole stalk, not a tip. Thirty spears is roughly a bunch and a half, on the order of a pound to a pound and a half. The half-inch tips are cut off and set aside to be boiled separately; everything else gets boiled and sieved.
- Three pints of stockSix cups. The recipe specifies only "soup stock" and names no meat. With the asparagus pulp and cream added the finished yield is somewhere around six to seven cups, enough for about six.
- The roux is deliberately tinyA small lump of butter and one teaspoon of flour into six cups of stock gives almost no thickening. That is intentional: the body comes from the asparagus pulp. If you want a thicker soup, take it to two tablespoons butter and two of flour, but expect a different, heavier soup than the one written.
- SievingA blender or food mill first, then a fine sieve. Asparagus stalks are stringy and the sieve is doing the real work; push the pulp through and discard the fibre left behind. Peeling the lower stalks before boiling saves effort here.
- The tips need two or three minutes, not a quarter hourBoil them separately in salted water until just tender and drop them in at the last moment, as directed. The quarter-hour simmer applies to the soup base only.
- Cream at the end, off the boilCream at the end -- Two or three tablespoons of cream into six cups is a gloss, not a cream soup. The original stirs it into the simmering soup; if you would rather not risk it separating, pull the pot off direct heat first.
- "Prepared spinach" is spinach greenThis is the old French vert d'épinards: raw spinach juice heated until the chlorophyll and protein coagulate, then strained, with the green curd kept and the water thrown away. It colours without flavouring. It is purely cosmetic and can be skipped; modern asparagus purée, not overcooked, is green enough on its own.
- Season at the endThe only seasoning specified is a little salt in the pulp. Salt again after the cream goes in, and a few grinds of white pepper and a squeeze of lemon do the soup no harm.
Buckeye Cookery came out of 1870s Ohio, and its soup chapter leans hard on the French repertoire that American cookbooks of the period were busy domesticating — a purée thickened with a token roux, finished with cream, and tinted with spinach green is straight out of the professional kitchen. That last step is the tell: vert d'épinards, spinach juice heated until it curdles so the green pigment can be lifted off and used as a dye, was a familiar preparation in nineteenth-century French practice, and its appearance in a Midwestern subscription cookbook shows how far those techniques had travelled. Asparagus itself was a spring luxury with a short local season and no reliable long-distance shipping, so a recipe using thirty stalks would have been tied to the spring months in Ohio. The book is at pains to extract every usable scrap of the stalk before the fibre is thrown out.