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Fried Asparagus
Wash and scrape the asparagus, cover with boiling water and let it stand five minutes; drain and dry on a soft towel. Sprinkle well with salt and pepper. Beat an egg until very light, add to it a half cup of milk and sufficient flour to make a thin batter, add a half teaspoonful of salt, and beat the batter until smooth. Dip the asparagus one piece at a time into this batter, and drop at once into hot fat, and fry until a golden brown. When done, drain on brown paper and serve hot.
A batter-fried asparagus that depends almost entirely on how dry the spears are when they meet the batter. The original assumes thin spring asparagus and a deep kettle of fat on the stove.
- Dry the spears properlyThis is the hinge. Batter will slide off damp asparagus and spit in the fat. After the five-minute soak, drain and blot until the surface is genuinely dry, and let the spears sit a few minutes in the air before dipping.
- "Scrape" the asparagusPeriod cookbooks routinely direct the cook to scrape the lower stalk with a knife, which suits thicker spears with a tough skin. With modern pencil-thin asparagus, snap off the woody base and skip the scraping; peel only the bottom two inches of anything thicker than a finger.
- The five-minute soak is not cookingThe five-minute soak is only a partial cooking -- Five minutes standing in water that is off the boil will soften thin spears but does little for thick ones. Thin asparagus will finish in the fat; spears thicker than about half an inch want a genuine one- to two-minute blanch in boiling water, then an ice bath, or the coating will brown before the inside softens.
- Batter proportionsOne egg and a half cup of milk take roughly a half to two-thirds cup of flour for a batter thin enough to coat without gluing. It should run off the spear in a sheet and leave a translucent film. Let it rest ten minutes and beat again if it thickens.
- Frying fat and temperature"Hot fat" here would most likely have been lard or beef drippings, deep enough to float the pieces; the modern equivalent is around 375F. Below that the batter drinks fat; above it, the coating colours before the vegetable is hot through. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- Brown paperGrocers' paper was the standard draining surface. Paper towels work, but a wire rack over a sheet pan keeps the underside crisp, which brown paper never quite did.
- SaltingThe spears are seasoned before dipping and there is a further half teaspoon in the batter. That is enough; taste before adding more at the table.
- YieldA single egg's worth of batter coats about a pound of asparagus, which serves three or four as a side dish. Fried asparagus does not hold, so serve it as it leaves the pan.
Hot Weather Dishes was written by Sarah Tyson Rorer of the Philadelphia Cooking School, who wrote steadily on light, seasonal and invalid cookery. The premise of such books was practical rather than culinary: before mechanical refrigeration reached ordinary households, a coal range heating a kitchen through July was a genuine hardship, and menus were built around short cooking and vegetables at their peak. Asparagus fits that logic, since the season ran from spring into early summer and the crop had to be used quickly. Frying it in batter, in the manner of a fritter, was standard treatment for almost any vegetable in this period.