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Asparagus Tips in Croustades
These are nice served with broiled chicken or chops, or as a separate course following the meat. The croustades can be prepared in advance and heated in a quick oven when wanted. Trim slices of bread two inches thick free from crusts.
Cut into squares three or four inches in size. With a pointed knife take from the center as much crumb as possible, leaving a small square box. Fry a golden brown in a kettle of hot fat; drain. Fill the centers with asparagus tips in any good sauce, or a well made cream sauce.
A fried bread case with a creamed filling — straightforward once you know what "quick oven" and "kettle of hot fat" mean in practice.
- Oven temperatureA quick oven is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Reheat the fried cases about 5 minutes on a rack set over a sheet pan so the bottoms stay crisp.
- The bread is the hingeYou need a close-grained, day-old unsliced loaf — a firm white pan loaf or brioche-style sandwich bread. Fresh, airy or heavily holed artisan bread collapses when you hollow it and soaks fat instead of crisping.
- Cutting the boxScore a square about half an inch in from the edges of the two-inch slab, then work the crumb out with the knife tip and your fingers, leaving a base at least a quarter inch thick. Any breach in the bottom lets the sauce run out.
- "Kettle of hot fat"A deep saucepan with 2–3 inches of neutral oil at 360–375F. Hold the case down with a spider or slotted spoon — bread floats — and turn it to brown all faces, about 1–2 minutes. Drain hollow-side down on a rack.
- Asparagus tipsUse the top 2–3 inches of medium spears; boil in salted water 2–3 minutes only, until barely tender, then drain well. Anything wetter or softer will thin the sauce and sog the bread.
- The cream sauceA basic white sauce — 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, salt, pepper, a scrape of nutmeg — cooked thick enough to mound on a spoon. A thin sauce defeats the whole construction.
- Assemble at the last minuteFill the cases as they go to the table. Even a crisp croustade softens within a few minutes of meeting hot sauce.
- YieldOne 3-inch case per person as a side, two as a separate course. A standard unsliced loaf should give roughly four cases, depending on its dimensions.
Croustade came into French from the Provençal croustado, itself from the Latin crusta, and the technique — hollowing bread into an edible vessel and frying or baking it hard — was the everyday cousin of the pastry vol-au-vent, a way to serve a small quantity of something sauced with the appearance of a made dish. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lean on it heavily, filling the cases with creamed sweetbreads, mushrooms, oysters, chicken or, as here, asparagus tips. The instruction to serve asparagus "as a separate course following the meat" reflects the French-influenced service that middle-class households were being taught at the time, and the note that the cases can be fried ahead is characteristic of the same books' practical streak: fry in the morning, crisp in the oven at dinner, and the cook is not deep-frying while the chops broil.