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Cream of Asparagus
1 can asparagus 2 qts. white stock 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 6 peppercorns 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 can cream Cut off tips of asparagus and reserve. Add stalks of asparagus with the seasoning to the stock. Boil thirty minutes. Strain through puree, thicken with Gold Medal flour cooked in melted butter. Add the asparagus tips and cream. Bring to boiling point and serve with croutons.
A standard veloute-style cream soup from the era when canned asparagus was the everyday form and canned cream sat in every pantry. Two things need translating: the can measures and the direction to "strain through puree."
- The hinge: don't boil the tipsCanned asparagus tips are already fully cooked and collapse into threads with any real simmering. The recipe itself directs you to bring the soup to boiling point after adding the tips and cream; if you want the tips to hold together, add them with the cream and take the pot off as soon as it steams and trembles.
- "Strain through puree"This means press the cooked stalks and stock through a puree sieve or china cap so the fibre stays behind and the pulp goes through. A food mill on the fine plate does the same job; a blender will pass the woody fibre straight into the soup, so sieve afterwards if you use one.
- Can sizesA period can of asparagus ran roughly 15-19 oz including its liquid, so about 2 cups. "Half a can of cream" in a book of this date most likely means canned or evaporated cream: figure three-quarters to one cup of heavy cream or half-and-half. The original is genuinely vague here, so season and taste rather than measuring to the letter.
- White stockVeal or chicken stock, unbrowned, made from bones with no roasted colour. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; half a teaspoon of salt is very little for two quarts, so taste before adding more.
- The roux is light on purposeThree tablespoons of flour to two quarts of liquid gives a soup barely thicker than the stock itself, which is correct for the style. Cook the flour in the butter two or three minutes without colouring, then whisk in a ladle of hot stock before returning it to the pot.
- PeppercornsWhole, added with the stalks, and removed by the sieve. If you skip the straining step for any reason, tie them in cloth.
- Fresh asparagus insteadTwo pounds of fresh asparagus works: snap off and reserve the tips, simmer the stalks in the stock for the full thirty minutes to draw out flavour, then blanch the tips separately for two minutes and add them at the end.
- YieldTwo quarts of stock plus cream serves eight to ten as a first course. The croutons are not optional in spirit — the soup is thin, and they are what gives the spoon something to meet.
Gold Medal's cook books were promotional literature: Washburn-Crosby (the Minneapolis miller that later became General Mills) printed them to put its flour in the hands of home cooks, which is why the flour is named in the ingredient list of a soup that would otherwise just say "flour." The soup itself is a textbook cream soup of the American domestic-science school — white stock, a light roux, a vegetable puree, cream and croutons — the pattern Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries taught as a formula to be varied by vegetable. The reliance on canned asparagus and canned cream is the period speaking: outside the short spring season, the can was often the only asparagus available.