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Asparagus Rolls
Remove the asparagus tips from the can, chill on the ice. Cut thin slices from a small square loaf of fresh warm bread, spread with mayonnaise and roll an asparagus tip in each slice of bread. Fasten with skewer and cover with a damp napkin until serving time. Remove skewers.
A cold-buffet canapé built on three things: pliable bread, a firm asparagus tip, and enough mayonnaise to glue the roll shut. The hinge is the bread — if it is stale, dry, or cut thick, the roll cracks along the outside of the curve and nothing will save it.
- "Small square loaf"Most likely what we would call a Pullman or sandwich loaf, baked in a lidded pan so every slice comes out square. A standard supermarket white sandwich loaf works; slice it lengthwise or trim the crusts and roll across the short side.
- Warm breadBread still slightly warm from the oven is more pliable and less likely to split when rolled, which is presumably why the original calls for it. If you are working with a bought loaf, cut thin slices, remove crusts, and flatten each one with a rolling pin — that does the same job.
- Canned asparagus tipsCanned tips are soft and salty and were the point in the period: uniform, available year-round, no cooking. Fresh tips blanched two to three minutes and shocked in ice water give a better roll, but they must be dried thoroughly or the mayonnaise slides.
- "Chill on the ice"An icebox instruction. Drain the tips, pat them dry, and refrigerate until cold; cold, firm spears hold their shape inside the bread.
- SkewersRead this as cocktail picks or wooden toothpicks, one per roll, pushed through crosswise. They hold the seam shut only while the roll sets — an hour in the refrigerator is enough.
- The damp napkinA clean cloth wrung out in cold water, laid over the tray, stops the cut edges drying and curling. Plastic wrap over the tray does the same and is easier; do not let a wet cloth sit directly on the bread or it will go soggy.
- Holding timeMayonnaise-dressed bread is at its best within two or three hours. Keep the tray refrigerated until serving rather than on a sideboard, and count it a same-day item.
- YieldThe recipe gives no count. A trimmed sandwich loaf will yield somewhere in the region of twenty slices, and therefore that many rolls; allow a couple per person as part of a tea or cocktail spread.
Asparagus rolls belong to the era of the ladies' luncheon and the bridge tea, when a hostess was judged on small cold food that could be made in advance and eaten standing up. Their existence depends almost entirely on canning: asparagus tips in tins made a spring luxury into a pantry staple, and cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries call for them freely in salads, timbales and sandwiches. The square loaf matters too — commercially baked Pullman bread, with its uniform crumb and straight sides, suited rolled and ribbon sandwiches, and such recipes appear regularly in period entertaining books. A rolled sandwich that could sit under a damp napkin until the guests arrived was exactly the sort of thing such books wanted.