Home › Vegetables › Asparagus (Wash clean cut off the white)
Asparagus (Wash clean cut off the white)
Wash clean; cut off the white part except a mere end, put into slightly salted boiling water, boil five minutes, pour off water, add more boiling hot; boil ten to fifteen minutes, then put in a lump of butter, salt and pepper (some stir in a thickening made of one tea-spoon flour mixed up with cold water); cut and toast two or three thin slices of bread, spread with butter and put in a dish, and over them turn asparagus and gravy. The water must be boiled down until just enough for the gravy, which is made as above. Or, cut the asparagus, when boiled, into little bits, leaving out white end, make gravy as above, put the cut asparagus into a hot dish, and turn the gravy over it and serve.
A simple manner of boiling asparagus is to tie in a bundle, or first wrap in cotton cloth and then tie, and set upright in a saucepan containing boiling water enough to reach nearly to the tender tips; boil rapidly till tender; lay a napkin on a hot platter, take out asparagus, drain for a moment, place on napkin, unwrap, and fold over the asparagus the corners of the napkin, and serve in this form, with white sauce in a gravy-boat.
Or, boiled asparagus may be made cold in ice-box, and served with a sauce made of vinegar, pepper, and salt.
A set of four ways to handle a single bunch of asparagus, from a thickened toast dish to plain spears on a napkin. The timings belong to an era of thicker, older, field-grown stalks and are the main thing to ignore.
- Cut the cooking time hardFifteen to twenty minutes of boiling will reduce modern asparagus to grey threads. Medium spears need 3-5 minutes in boiling salted water, thin ones 2; they are done when a knife tip slides into the thickest part with slight resistance.
- The two-water boilDraining after five minutes and starting again with fresh boiling water turns up in nineteenth-century cookery; the recipe gives no reason for it, though tempering the flavour of mature stalks is the usual explanation. It also pours away much of the taste. With today's asparagus there is no reason for it.
- "The white part"This is the pale woody butt, not a different variety. Rather than measuring, hold each spear at both ends and bend until it snaps; it breaks where the fibre ends. Peeling the lower two inches of thick spears works as well.
- The gravyOne teaspoon of flour slaked in cold water is a thin slurry, meant to bind the reduced cooking liquid into something that will sit on toast rather than soak straight through. Let it boil a full minute after it goes in or it will taste of raw flour.
- Reducing the waterThe instruction to boil the water down "until just enough for the gravy" cannot be done alongside briefly cooked asparagus. Lift the spears out when tender, then reduce the liquid separately to roughly half a cup before thickening.
- The upright bundleTying the spears and standing them tip-up, with water reaching nearly to the tips as the recipe says, lets the stems boil while the tips steam; it suits thick asparagus and needs no cloth wrapping. A tall pot or a wedge of foil to keep the bundle standing is enough.
- White sauceHere this almost certainly means a plain flour-and-butter sauce made with milk rather than a hollandaise. Roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk gives the pouring consistency a gravy-boat wants.
- The cold versionVinegar, pepper and salt with no oil is a sharp dressing by modern standards. Whisking in two or three parts oil to one of vinegar brings it into the range most cooks expect of a vinaigrette.
- YieldA pound of asparagus, about one supermarket bunch, serves three as a side or two on toast as a light supper dish.
Asparagus on buttered toast is a long-established English-language way of serving the vegetable, and it appears here in a Midwestern American book of 1877 largely unchanged: the toast catches the liquid, which is why the recipe insists on reducing the cooking water rather than throwing it out. The alternative service — spears drained, laid on a folded napkin on a hot platter, and the corners turned over them — was a familiar formal presentation on both sides of the Atlantic, the linen absorbing the last of the water so the sauce is not diluted at the table. That Buckeye Cookery gives four methods for one vegetable reflects its compiled origin: the book was assembled from contributions by Ohio housewives. Asparagus in the 1870s was a strictly seasonal spring crop with a short window, which is why a household book would bother listing so many ways to use it at once.