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Purée d'Asperges
(Asparagus Purée.) Ingredients.
Fifty heads of Asparagus.
One quart of Stock or Water.
One pound of Spinach.
Half a pint of White Sauce.
One gill of Cream.
Seasoning. Boil the asparagus in stock or water with the spinach till tender, and then make the liquid up to one quart again. Pass the asparagus through a hair sieve. Return to the saucepan and re-heat; add the sauce and cream, and serve.
A classical purée soup dressed in French service language: the spinach is there for colour, not flavour, and the white sauce is the thickener. The whole thing takes about half an hour.
- Quantities in plain termsFifty heads of asparagus is roughly 2 lb, which is three or four bunches of the usual 250 g supermarket size (about two of the larger 1 lb bunches). One pound of spinach is a large bag of raw leaf, which cooks down to very little.
- A gill and a half-pintThis is a British book, so a gill is 5 fl oz (a quarter of an imperial pint) and the half-pint of white sauce is 10 fl oz. In US measure, about ⅔ cup of cream and 1¼ cups of sauce.
- White sauce means béchamelA plain roux-based sauce of butter, flour and milk, made a little thicker than pouring consistency. It carries the body of the soup, so a thin one will leave the purée watery.
- Trim before you boilSnap off and discard the woody butts. Their fibre will not go through any sieve and is the usual reason a home-made asparagus purée turns out stringy.
- The spinach is a colourantCooked asparagus goes drab olive; the spinach restores the green. Note that the recipe boils the spinach with the asparagus from the start; adding it only for the last few minutes will keep the colour brighter.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve; such sieves were preferred for fine purées, and metal ones were often said to taint or discolour acid foods. A blender followed by a push through a fine chinois or a food mill does the same work far faster.
- Make the liquid up againThe instruction to bring the cooking liquid back to a quart matters: boiling reduces it, and the finished soup is balanced around a full quart of stock plus sauce and cream.
- Do not boil after the creamReheat the purée first, then add sauce and cream off a hard boil. A flour-thickened soup with cream in it will catch and taste scorched with very little provocation.
- Seasoning and yieldSalt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. It serves six as a first course; a squeeze of lemon at the end lifts it, though the original gives no seasoning detail beyond the word itself.
Purée soups of this kind were the backbone of late-Victorian and Edwardian "high class" cookery in Britain, where the menu language was French even when the produce was entirely local. The technique — vegetable boiled in stock, sieved, bound with béchamel and finished with cream — is the standard formula of the period, applied interchangeably to peas, artichokes, celery or asparagus, and greening a purée with spinach was a familiar professional device rather than anything specific to this dish. Asparagus was a prestige vegetable with a short English season, grown commercially around the Vale of Evesham and on the Lancashire coast.