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Asparagus Sauce
Cut the green ends off a quarter of a hundred of asparagus, and boil them in salt and water until they are tender. Drain well, make a little good melted butter, using stock instead of water, putting with it a lump of sugar and the juice of a lemon. Fry the asparagus points in a little boiling butter, press them through a sieve, then add them to the melted butter, and let all boil up together. If the colour is not very good, a few leaves of young spinach mixed in a mortar with pounded sugar will improve it. Time to boil the asparagus, ten minutes. To fry it, six or seven. Sufficient, a quarter of a hundred of asparagus for half a pint of melted butter. Probable cost, 10d. per half pint.
A Victorian purée sauce built on the English "melted butter" — a flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan. A few of the quantities are written in period shorthand.
- "A quarter of a hundred"Asparagus was sold and counted by the hundred, so this is 25 spears. Depending on thickness that is somewhere between a pound and a pound and a half; the recipe only wants the green tips, so buy a little more than you think.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn English cookery of this period melted butter means butter thickened with flour and let down with liquid, here stock rather than water, to make half a pint (about 10 fl oz, a generous US cup). Period proportions vary and generally use much less flour than butter. It is not clarified or simply liquefied butter, and the recipe will not work if you treat it as such.
- A lump of sugarA single lump; period lumps were cut from a loaf and varied in size, so a teaspoon or so is a reasonable modern reading. It appears intended to round the stock and the lemon rather than to sweeten the sauce.
- The timings are for a puréeTen minutes' boiling then six or seven in butter would ruin asparagus served whole, but everything here is going through a sieve. Boil the tips only until they yield easily, then give them a short turn in hot butter for flavour; do not let them brown or the finished sauce goes khaki.
- SievingPressing hot asparagus through a hair sieve with a wooden spoon is the original method and it is worth the effort — a blender leaves fibrous threads that a food mill or drum sieve catches. If you use a blender, pass the purée afterwards.
- The lemon and the colourAcid dulls green vegetables, and the recipe's optional pounded spinach reads as a corrective for just that. Adding the lemon juice at the very end, off the heat, should keep the sauce brighter.
- The spinach trickYoung spinach pounded with sugar in a mortar and pressed for its juice is the Victorian green colouring, the domestic version of the professional vert d'épinards. A tablespoon of raw spinach purée stirred in off the heat does the same thing; boiling it turns it grey.
- Yield and servingHalf a pint, about 10 fl oz or a generous US cup -- enough for perhaps four as a sauce for poached chicken, veal, boiled eggs or fish. Reheat gently and never let it boil hard once the puree is in.
- Probable costTenpence a half-pint was not trifling; asparagus was a luxury crop, which explains a recipe designed to make 25 spears flavour a whole sauceboat.
Cassell's belonged to the era when asparagus was counted rather than weighed -- market bundles were sold by the hundred, and grades ran from "sprue" (thin) up to large forced heads. That system of counting is why the quantity here reads so oddly to a modern eye. Rather than serve costly asparagus whole, the tips are pulped into a butter sauce so a quarter of a hundred spears can flavour a dish for a whole table. The spinach colouring is equally of its time; before food dyes were sold to households, cooks kept spinach green, cochineal red and saffron yellow as standard kitchen colourings, and pounding spinach with sugar in a mortar to extract a green juice appears in nineteenth-century manuals.