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Ragout of Asparagus
Clean and boil one bunch of asparagus, and then cut into pieces one and a half inches long. Cut one head of lettuce and one onion into small pieces. Put two ounces of butter in a stewing-pan and when melted put in the asparagus, onion and lettuce, shake occasionally and fry ten minutes, then sprinkle over it one tablespoonful of flour, stir and mix carefully without breaking the asparagus, then add a half pint of stock, and stir carefully until it boils, add a teaspoonful of salt, two dashes of black pepper and serve in a heated dish with squares of toast.
A straightforward braise that turns asparagus, lettuce and onion into a light stew thickened with a spoon of flour. Two details in the original will trip up a modern cook: the asparagus is cooked twice, and the lettuce is meant to collapse.
- Don't boil the asparagus throughThe spears go on to fry ten minutes and then simmer in stock, so the first boil should be brief — three or four minutes for medium spears, until just short of tender. Boiling to doneness first gives you a grey purée by the time it reaches the table.
- One bunchA market bunch today runs about 1 lb (roughly 450 g), and bunch size was never standardised, so anywhere from 1 to 1 1/2 lb will suit. Trim the woody ends before measuring anything.
- Which lettuceA firm-headed cos or garden cabbage lettuce is the likeliest intent, rather than a soft leaf lettuce. Romaine holds its shape through the braise; iceberg will water the sauce down.
- Butter and stewing-panTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons (55 g). A "stewing-pan" is a wide, shallow saucepan or sauté pan with a lid — enough surface area that the vegetables sweat in a single layer rather than steaming in a heap.
- Half a pint of stockIn an American book of this period that is 1 cup (240 ml); in a British one, 10 fl oz. Either works. A light chicken or veal stock suits it; vegetable stock is fine, but skip anything heavily reduced or salted, since a full teaspoon of salt is added at the end.
- Fry ten minutesKeep the heat moderate and shake rather than stir, as instructed. The point is to soften the onion and cook the flour's raw taste out of the butter afterwards, not to brown anything.
- Season at the end, and tasteA teaspoonful of salt is a lot for one cup of stock if the stock is already seasoned. Add half, taste, then finish.
- Yield and servingServes three or four as a first course or light supper dish. Cut the toast into triangles or squares and set them under or around the ragout just before it goes out, so they do not turn to paste.
The dish is French in method — ragoût simply means a stew, from ragoûter, to revive the appetite — and the pairing of asparagus with braised lettuce and onion belongs to a broad family of French vegetable braises that English and American cookery took up in the second half of the 1800s. Cooked lettuce, which reads as odd today, was entirely ordinary then; it appears stewed, stuffed and in soups throughout the period. The squares of toast are the era's standard support for anything saucy, doing the work a modern cook would give to rice or pasta.