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Garnish, Asparagus For
Chop the green part of asparagus into pieces the size of a pea. Boil them until nearly tender, drain and shake them over the fire for ten minutes, with a little butter, pepper, and salt. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. per hundred heads. Sufficient, fifty heads to garnish a small dish.
A Victorian garnish of asparagus cut to the size of peas, meant to be scattered round a dish rather than served on its own. The one thing to change is the timing.
- Ten minutes is too longAfter blanching, asparagus dice need no more than a minute or two tossed in butter to heat through and gloss over. Ten minutes over heat will take them grey-green and slack.
- "Boil until nearly tender"For pieces this small in well-salted water, that is 60-90 seconds. Drain at once and, if you are not finishing them immediately, cool them in ice water to hold the colour.
- "Shake them over the fire"Toss in a wide pan over medium heat, moving the pan rather than stirring, so the cubes coat in butter without breaking up. About 1 tbsp butter for fifty heads' worth of tips.
- "The green part"Victorian asparagus was often thick, white-stemmed forced or trench-grown stock, so only the upper green portion was usable. With modern green asparagus you can take the top two-thirds; snap or peel away anything fibrous.
- Fifty headsFifty spears will yield a generous quantity of pea-sized dice, enough to ring a platter of fish, cutlets or eggs for several people. Bunch sizes vary, so count spears rather than bunches.
- The old price"2s. 6d. per hundred heads" is pre-decimal British currency, two shillings and sixpence, and tells you only that asparagus was a luxury sold by the head rather than by weight.
- ServingDress the garnish at the last moment. Held warm it weeps butter and dulls, which defeats the point of cutting it so neatly.
Cassell's includes this as one of its short garnish entries, because a nineteenth-century kitchen treated garnish as a discipline in itself: vegetables were cut to standard sizes and colours and kept ready to frame a dish. Asparagus cut small in this way is close to the French kitchen's *pointes d'asperges*, asparagus tips used to finish fish, eggs, sweetbreads and vol-au-vents. Selling asparagus by the hundred heads, as the costing here does, was normal English practice into the twentieth century, and the price quoted marks it as an expensive item, some of it forced under glass or grown in market gardens such as those around London and the Vale of Evesham. The instruction to use only the green part is a reminder that the fat blanched stems then in fashion were tough and pale below the tip.