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Asparagus with Eggs
Cut up about two dozen heads of cooked asparagus into small pieces, and mix in a stewpan with the well-beaten yolks of two raw eggs. Flavour with pepper and salt and stir freely. Add a piece of butter the size of a walnut, and keep on stirring for a couple of minutes or so. Serve on delicately toasted bread. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A quick supper dish that is essentially a loose asparagus custard, and it turns on heat control more than anything else.
- Lowest possible heatTwo egg yolks and a couple of dozen asparagus tips have very little liquid to buffer them, so a hot pan will scramble the yolks into grains in seconds. Keep the stewpan over the gentlest flame, or set it over barely simmering water, and pull it off the heat while it still looks slightly underdone.
- StewpanIn this period a stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan with a lid, not a casserole dish. Any small heavy-based saucepan works; a nonstick pan makes the scraping easier.
- Butter the size of a walnutCommonly reckoned at about 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. The recipe adds it before the last couple of minutes of stirring, where it also drops the pan temperature and helps stop the yolks tightening.
- Two dozen headsDepending on thickness and how much of the spear is used, perhaps up to about 1 lb of raw asparagus, which cooks down to a modest amount. The recipe calls for asparagus already cooked and drained, though it does not say whether it is left from an earlier dish.
- Cooking the asparagus firstBoil or steam the spears until just tender, then drain thoroughly and pat dry. Wet asparagus will loosen the yolk mixture into a puddle rather than a sauce.
- Yield and servingEnough for two as a light first course, on two or three slices of toast. Make the toast last so it is still crisp, and spoon the mixture on at the table rather than in advance.
- Probable cost1s. 3d. is fifteen old pence, priced for a Victorian household buying asparagus in season. It is quoted for the cook's marketing book and has no useful modern equivalent.
Cassell's belongs to the great run of late-Victorian household dictionaries that treated cookery as an alphabetical reference subject, complete with a costing for every entry so that a mistress could check her cook's accounts. Egg yolks stirred over low heat with butter is the same technique behind the French œufs brouillés, and English cookery of the period borrowed the method freely while keeping the plain vehicle of buttered toast.