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Asparagus, Fricasseed
Wash a quarter of a hundred heads of asparagus, cut off the tender portion, and lay them into cold water until they are required. Drain them, and chop them along with a young lettuce, half a head of endive, and a small onion. Put a piece of butter the size of an egg into a saucepan, melt it, then mix with it smoothly a dessert-spoonful of flour and half a pint of stock. Add the chopped vegetables, with pepper and salt, and let all stew gently until the sauce is thick and good. Serve hot. Time to stew, half an hour. Probable cost for this quantity, 1s.
A vegetable fricassee in the older sense: everything stewed together in a light flour-thickened sauce. The quantities are Victorian shorthand, and the stewing time needs thought.
- "A quarter of a hundred heads"Twenty-five spears, or one to two supermarket bunches depending on size. Only the tender upper portion is used, so expect to discard a fair proportion of the weight.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. With the dessert-spoonful of flour (2 teaspoons) that is a very butter-heavy roux, so the sauce thickens by reduction as much as by starch.
- Half a pint of stockAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. A light chicken or vegetable stock suits it; a strong beef stock will flatten the asparagus entirely.
- EndiveHere it means curly endive or the broad-leaved escarole, not Belgian chicory. Half a head is a generous handful of leaves, and it adds a bitter note against the other vegetables.
- The half hour is for the sauce, not the asparagusStewing time -- The recipe adds all the vegetables together and stews them for half an hour, which will leave cut asparagus soft and drab. If you want it to keep some bite, build and reduce the sauce with the onion, lettuce and endive first, then add the asparagus for the last six to eight minutes.
- Cut the asparagus, do not chop itThe instruction to chop everything together produces mush from the tips. Cut the spears into inch lengths and keep the tips separate, adding them last.
- SeasoningFlour, butter and lettuce all mute salt. Season at the end, and a squeeze of lemon or a grating of nutmeg lifts it without straying from period practice.
- YieldServes four as a side dish, or two as a light supper course with toast. The "probable cost, 1s." is the book's price guide for a household of that era and has no modern equivalent.
Fricassee came into English kitchens from French cookery meaning meat cut up and stewed in a pale sauce, and the word had loosened enough — earlier than is often assumed — to cover vegetables treated the same way: cut small, simmered in butter, flour and stock, and served without browning. Cassell's places this among its asparagus entries at a time when the vegetable was a spring luxury of the English kitchen garden, grown in raised beds and cut over a short season. The lettuce is worth noting. Cooking lettuce rather than dressing it was routine in Victorian and earlier English cookery, and it survives now mainly in French peas à la française; its role here is to add bulk and a faint sweetness against the bitter endive.