Asparagus Soup
One bundle of asparagus, one pint water, one pint milk or thin cream, one-half an onion, one tablespoon each of butterand flour, salt and pepper to taste. Cut the heads from the asparagus and cook for twenty minutes in boiling salted water. Cook the stalks and onion in one pint of water for twenty minutes. Rub this through a sieve. Blend butter and flour, add one pint of boiling milk, pepper and salt to taste. Mix with the cooked asparagus and boil for five minutes.
Strain again, add the asparagus heads and serve very hot.
A straightforward cream soup built on a thin roux-thickened milk base, with the asparagus tips held back so they keep their shape. A few of the quantities and timings need translating.
- A bundle of asparagusA modern supermarket bunch runs about 1 lb, and a period bundle was probably in the same range, though the term was never standardised. Use about 1.5 lb if you want the soup to taste distinctly of asparagus rather than of milk.
- Cook the tips brieflyTwenty minutes in boiling water will reduce asparagus tips to grey mush. Two to four minutes is enough for them to be tender and still green; drop them into cold water to stop the cooking and add them at the end as directed.
- The stalks are the flavour baseThe twenty minutes given for the stalks and onion is reasonable, since they are being pushed through a sieve anyway. Snap off and discard the woody bottom inch or two before simmering, and use the cooking water — the recipe intends you to sieve stalks and liquid together, not to drain them.
- SievingA drum sieve and wooden pestle were standard equipment; a food mill or a blender followed by a fine strainer does the same work in a fraction of the time. Blending alone leaves fibrous threads, so the final straining the recipe calls for is worth keeping.
- Blend butter and flourThis is a white roux. Cook the tablespoon each of butter and flour together for a minute or two over low heat before adding the milk, or the soup will taste of raw flour. One tablespoon of flour to a pint of milk gives a deliberately thin soup.
- Milk or thin cream"Thin cream" meant the pouring cream of the day, roughly what would now be sold as light or single cream, rather than double cream; exact fat contents were not standardised. Whole milk works perfectly well for the leaner version.
- The five-minute boilBoiling a milk-thickened soup risks scorching on the bottom of the pan. A gentle simmer with frequent stirring, five minutes, achieves the same thing.
- YieldA quart of finished soup — four small first-course servings, or two as a main.
Cream soups of this kind are often said to have been a staple of the American middle-class dinner table around 1900: a vegetable purée, a spoonful of roux, endlessly varied by whatever was in season. Asparagus made the list because it was one of the first genuinely welcome vegetables of spring, and, it is generally suggested, because commercial cultivation near cities had put it within reach of ordinary households by the late nineteenth century. The instinct to cook the tips separately and return them whole at the end may well predate the recipe, and it shows a cook who understood that the stalks were there for flavour and the tips for the look of the thing. Good Housekeeping, founded in 1885, was by this period assembling exactly this sort of dependable, teachable formula — the kind a young housekeeper could learn once and apply to peas, celery or spinach without being told twice.