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Boiled Asparagus
Choose bunches of asparagus which have the cut fresh and the heads straight. If the cut end is brown and dry, and the heads bent on one side, the asparagus is stale. It may be kept a day or two with the stalks in cold water, but is much better fresh. Scrape off the white skin from the lower end, and cut the stalks of equal length. Let them lie in cold water until it is time to cook them. Put a handful of salt into a gallon of water and let it boil. Tie the asparagus in bundles and put them into it. Toast a slice of bread brown on each side, dip it in the water, and lay it on a dish. When the asparagus is sufficiently cooked, dish it on the toast, serving with drawn butter sauce, or Hollandaise.
A straightforward Victorian treatment of asparagus, with two details worth attention: the salt ratio and the cooking time, which the original leaves unstated.
- Cooking timeThe original says only "sufficiently cooked." Thin spears take 2-3 minutes in boiling water, thick ones 4-6. Test with a knife tip at the base of the stalk; it should meet slight resistance. Asparagus boiled to collapse loses both colour and flavour.
- The salt waterA handful of salt to a gallon is a large amount by modern habit, somewhere upward of 3 tablespoons depending on the hand and the grain of the salt; it seasons the spears as they cook. Bring it to a full rolling boil before the bundles go in.
- Tying in bundlesKitchen twine around the middle of each bunch keeps the spears together and lets you lift them all out at once, which is the point. Loop loosely so water circulates.
- PeelingThe "white skin" is the tough fibrous outer layer of the lower stalk. Modern asparagus is often sold thinner and needs only the woody base snapped off, but thick spears genuinely benefit from a peeler run from mid-stalk down.
- The toastThe toast is dipped in the cooking water and laid under the spears; it catches the drips, and it is also there to be eaten with the sauce. Use a firm bread that will not disintegrate.
- Drawn butter sauceIn nineteenth-century American cookery drawn butter is usually a thin sauce of butter, flour and water or stock rather than plain melted butter, roughly a butter-thickened gravy; British usage was looser and often meant melted butter. Hollandaise, given as the alternative, is the richer choice.
- YieldA standard bunch of about 1 lb serves two to three as a side dish. Cook in more water than seems necessary so the temperature does not crash when the bundles go in.
Asparagus was a luxury of the short spring season in the nineteenth century, and this recipe, like others of its date, spends as much space on choosing it as on cooking it, because it deteriorates within days of cutting. Serving boiled asparagus on a slice of dipped toast was a familiar English and American presentation, and it solved the practical problem of a wet vegetable on a dry platter.