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Asparagus, Boiled
Choose bunches of asparagus which have the cut fresh and the heads straight. If the cut end is brown and dry, and the heads bent on one side, the asparagus is stale. It may be kept a day or two with the stalks in cold water, but is much better fresh. Scrape off the white skin from the lower end, and cut the stalks of equal length. Let them lie in cold water until it is time to cook them. Put a handful of salt into a gallon of water, and let it boil. Tie the asparagus loosely in small bundles and put them into it. Toast a slice of bread brown on each side, dip it in the water, and lay it on a dish. When the asparagus is sufficiently cooked, dish it on the toast, leaving the white ends outwards each way. Send melted butter to table with it. Time to cook, about twenty minutes. Fresh asparagus cooks more quickly than stale. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. a hundred. Sufficient, fifty for half a dozen persons.
A straightforward Victorian treatment, with one instruction modern cooks will want to overturn: the cooking time.
- Twenty minutes is far too longModern asparagus, thinner and picked closer to cooking, is done in 3-6 minutes in boiling water depending on thickness — the tip of a knife should meet slight resistance at the base. Twenty minutes gives the grey, collapsing spears the period accepted as normal.
- Sold by the hundredAsparagus was priced and portioned by the individual spear, not by weight. Fifty spears for six people is roughly 3 lb of modern asparagus, or about 8 oz per person.
- Scraping the stalksEnglish asparagus of the period was often earthed up so the lower stem stayed white and woody, hence the scraping. With today's green spears, snap or trim the tough end and peel only the bottom inch or two of thick spears.
- The saltA handful of salt to a gallon is generous but not absurd — perhaps two to four tablespoons, depending on the hand. Well-salted water seasons the spears; there is no need to reduce it much.
- Tying in bundlesBundling with kitchen string lets you lift the whole lot out at once before it overcooks, which is one reason for it. A wide sauté pan and tongs do the same job.
- The toastThe dipped toast is there to absorb the water clinging to the spears so the butter is not diluted. It works, but draining well on a cloth is more usual now.
- Melted butterIn this period "melted butter" often means a flour-thickened butter sauce rather than simply butter warmed through. Either suits the dish; plain warm butter with lemon and pepper is the modern default.
- Cost2s. 6d. a hundred marks asparagus as a luxury vegetable in this book: roughly a day's wages for a labourer to buy enough to serve a dozen people.
Asparagus reached English kitchen gardens by the sixteenth century and was long a marker of horticultural skill and expense, since a bed takes two or three years to come into production and yields only a few weeks each spring. The fashionable form in this period was the thick spear, banked with soil to keep the lower stem white and tender — hence the instruction to scrape the white skin and to lay the spears with "the white ends outwards". Serving on toast, common through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is a practical solution to a watery vegetable and a rich sauce, and survives in the British habit of asparagus on buttered bread. The note that it may be kept a day or two standing in water reflects a period when produce reached the household by cart and rail rather than refrigerated lorry.