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Asparagus Heads as Peas
Take off about two inches of the head-ends of the asparagus; cut them into pieces about the size of peas, and put them into a saucepan with some salt and cold water. Let them boil about ten minutes; then take them out, drain them, melt in a saucepan a piece of butter the size of an egg, and place them in it. Shake the saucepan over the fire for a few minutes; then sprinkle a dessert-spoonful of flour over it, and a small tea-cupful of boiling water, pepper and salt to taste, and pour over the asparagus the beaten yolks of two eggs, mixed with four table-spoonfuls of new milk. Let all simmer gently for five or ten minutes; then serve. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Allow a hundred for a tureen full. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian way of stretching the tender tips of a large bundle of asparagus into a dish that eats like buttered green peas. The finish is a yolk liaison, which sets the one rule that matters.
- Never let the sauce boilOnce the yolks and milk go in, the pan must stay at a bare shiver — around 160-175F. A boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into curds in seconds. Pull the pan half off the heat and stir until it coats a spoon.
- Cut the timing right downThe original allows ten minutes of boiling, but pieces cut pea-size cook through in 2-3 minutes. Modern asparagus boiled the full ten will be grey and collapsed before it ever reaches the butter.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is a generous amount for the quantity of asparagus and it is doing the work of the sauce base along with the flour.
- Spoon and cup measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons. A small teacupful of boiling water is perhaps 4-5 fl oz — start with less and add, since the yolks and milk will thicken it further.
- New milkSimply fresh, unskimmed milk straight from the dairy. Whole milk is the direct substitute; single cream gives a richer sauce closer to what a Victorian cook would have got from milk that had not been standardised.
- A hundred headsThe old grass was sold in bundles of a hundred, so this calls for a full bundle's worth of tips. In modern terms you will need in the region of 3 lb or more of asparagus, depending on thickness, to yield enough two-inch tips for five or six people.
- Cost and serving2s 6d was a substantial sum for a vegetable dish. Serve it hot in a warmed tureen or vegetable dish, as the recipe's "tureen full" implies.
Asparagus "as peas" — asperges en petits pois in French practice — is a thrift dressed as a luxury: it treats the most expensive two inches of an expensive vegetable as though it were the cheapest green on the market. English asparagus was sold by the hundred heads rather than by weight well into the twentieth century, and the grades ran from thin sprue up to fat forced "grass" from the Vale of Evesham and the market gardens around Deptford and Mortlake. The egg-and-milk liaison poured over at the end is standard nineteenth-century practice for finishing a delicate vegetable: the point being demonstrated is that a yolk thickening must be coaxed, never boiled.