Asparagus Soup
3 cups White Stock II or III 1 can asparagus 2 cups cold water 1 slice onion 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 2 cups scalded milk Salt and pepper Drain and rinse asparagus, reserve tips, and add stalks to cold water; boil five minutes, drain, add stock, and onion; boil thirty minutes, rub through sieve, and bind with butter and flour cooked together. Add salt, pepper, milk, and tips.
A standard cream soup of the period: vegetable simmered in stock, sieved, then bound with a white roux and finished with milk. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the quantities and ingredients need translating.
- White Stock II or IIIA cross-reference to the stock chapter of the same book — a light veal or chicken stock, unsalted and unthickened. Three cups of any mild homemade chicken stock, or a low-sodium commercial one, will stand in.
- The canned asparagusCan sizes varied; a period can of asparagus would have run somewhere around a pound. Canned asparagus is soft and salty, so the directed rinsing is worth doing. About 1 lb of fresh asparagus, trimmed and simmered until tender, gives a cleaner flavour, though the soup will then be greener and less mellow.
- Stalks and tips are treated differentlyOnly the stalks go into the long boil; the tips are held back and added at the very end so they stay whole. Adding them early turns them to threads in the sieve.
- The thirty-minute boilWith canned asparagus this is longer than modern taste wants — the vegetable is already cooked. Twelve to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer extracts plenty of flavour and keeps the colour from going olive.
- Rub through a sieveA blender or stick blender does the work in seconds, but pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards anyway: asparagus stalks carry fibrous strings that no blender breaks down.
- Binding with butter and flourCook the equal parts butter and flour together for two or three minutes without colouring, then whisk in the hot purée gradually. Adding the liquid all at once is what produces lumps.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below the boil, around 180F, so the finished soup is not chilled when the milk goes in. Whole milk gives the intended body; skim will taste thin against the flour.
- Seasoning and yieldThe recipe gives no salt quantity because the stock and the canned asparagus vary so much — taste after the milk goes in. The first 2 cups of water are drained off, so the finished soup is the stock plus 2 cups of milk and the purée: about 5 cups, or four first-course servings.