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Sauce
Butter thoroughly a charlotte mold, quart size, and line it with cooked tips of asparagus well drained. Cook two tablespoons of flour and two tablespoons of butter together, add a teaspoon of salt, a dash of cayenne and one cup of cream gradually. Allow it to boil five minutes, remove from the fire, add one cup of cooked asparagus tips and four eggs thoroughly beaten. Turn the mixture carefully into the decorated mold, set the mold into a pan of hot water and cook-in a moderate oven about thirty minutes, or until the center is firm. Turn the loaf onto a dish, arrange about it little triangular pieces of bread that have been dipped in beaten egg and milk and browned in hot butter. Pour around the sauce and serve at once.
An asparagus timbale baked in a water bath and turned out whole, with egg-dipped bread points around it. The headnote says "Sauce" but the recipe never specifies which one, so that choice is yours.
- The hinge: it is a custardFour eggs to one cup of cream thickened with two tablespoons each of flour and butter is a savory custard, and it fails the same way sweet custards do. Keep the water bath hot but not boiling and pull the mold as soon as the center is set; overcooked, it weeps and turns granular.
- Moderate ovenRead as somewhere around 350F. Thirty minutes is realistic for a quart mold in a water bath, but test the center with a thin knife rather than trusting the clock.
- Charlotte moldA straight-sided tin pail-shaped mold, here a quart. Any 4-cup souffle dish, charlotte tin or Pyrex bowl works; butter it heavily and, if you want insurance against sticking, line the bottom disc with parchment before the asparagus goes in.
- Lining the moldLay the drained tips head-down against the buttered sides in an even ring so they show when the loaf is inverted. They must be genuinely dry or the pattern slides. Boil or steam them just until tender, no longer, since they get a second cooking in the oven.
- CreamHeavy cream is the safer reading here, since the fat is what keeps the custard tender; period "cream" covered a range of richnesses, but a rich one suits this mixture.
- Boil it five minutesThe flour-butter-cream base does need a few minutes of actual simmering to cook out the raw starch, but stir it constantly and let it cool to warm before the eggs go in, or they will scramble.
- UnmoldingLet the baked timbale stand five to ten minutes out of the water before inverting. Run a knife around the rim, set the serving dish on top, and turn the whole thing over in one motion.
- The missing sauceNothing in the text tells you what to pour around it. Hollandaise is one common partner for asparagus in books of this vintage; a thin cream sauce or a mousseline also suits.
- YieldA quart mold serves four to six as a first course or a light supper dish. Serve it immediately, as the recipe insists: it slumps and cools quickly.
Timbales and vegetable "loaves" set with egg were a fixture of American company cooking from the 1880s through the 1920s, when the ability to turn a soft mixture out of a mold intact was a mark of a trained cook. Asparagus carried particular prestige: it was seasonal, labor-intensive to grow and cut, and expensive enough that lining a mold with whole tips advertised the expense. The egg-dipped bread points around the base are croutons in the older French sense, fried bread used as a garnish and edge rather than a crouton scattered in soup. The dish belongs to the same family of thought as the aspics and charlottes elsewhere in these books, where the shape of the food mattered nearly as much as the flavor. That the header here reads simply "Sauce" is a reminder of how these volumes were assembled, with the sauce recipe presumably sitting nearby on the page in the original printing.