Home › Vegetables › Scalloped Asparagus
Scalloped Asparagus
Wash and scrape the asparagus and cut into pieces a half inch in length, throw into boiling salted water, and boil rapidly twenty minutes. Drain, saving the water in which it was boiled. To each pint of the asparagus pieces allow:
1 tablespoonful of butter 1 gill of the asparagus water ½ teaspoonful of salt 1 tablespoonful of flour 1 gill of thick cream A dash of pepper Put the butter in a frying pan to melt; do not brown; add the flour, rub until smooth, then add the cream and asparagus water, stir continually until it boils, take from the fire and add the salt and pepper. Put a layer of the asparagus in the bottom of a baking dish, then a layer of the sauce, then another layer of the asparagus, and another of sauce, and so continue having the last layer sauce. Sprinkle the top lightly with stale bread crumbs, and stand in a very quick oven for a few moments to brown,
A straightforward béchamel gratin, workable as written except for the boiling time, which belongs to an era when vegetables were cooked to submission.
- The twenty-minute boilHalf-inch pieces of asparagus are tender in three to five minutes in rapidly boiling salted water, and army-green mush by twenty. Boil briefly, drain, and still reserve the cooking water — the sauce depends on it for flavour.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The recipe calls for a gill each of asparagus water and cream per pint of cut asparagus, so one cup of liquid total.
- A pint of asparagusMeasured as cut pieces, loosely packed — somewhere around half to three-quarters of a pound of trimmed spears. One tablespoon each butter and flour to a cup of liquid gives a thin sauce that will settle between the layers rather than sit on them.
- Thick creamPeriod "thick cream" was a high-fat cream, closest today to heavy cream. Half-and-half will work but gives a noticeably thinner result.
- ScrapingNineteenth-century asparagus was often thick and sandy at the base. Modern thin spears need only the woody ends snapped off; peel the lower third of fat spears with a vegetable peeler if the skin is tough.
- A very quick oven450–475°F. The dish is fully cooked going in and wants only colour on the crumbs, so a few minutes is literal. A broiler does the same job faster if the dish is shallow and heatproof.
- Stale bread crumbsDry crumbs from day-old bread, not the fine sandy commercial kind, which scorch before they brown. Toss them with a little melted butter if you want reliable colour in a short blast of heat.
- YieldA pint of asparagus with its sauce serves three or four as a side. The proportions scale directly.
History: Scalloping — layering a cooked ingredient with sauce and crumbs and browning the top — was one of the workhorse methods of the nineteenth-century American cookbook, applied to oysters, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage and, here, asparagus. Its practical appeal is that everything is cooked on the stovetop, and the oven is called on for only a few minutes at the end rather than the hour a baked dish would demand. Asparagus was a late-spring and early-summer vegetable before refrigerated rail shipping widened its season. The instruction to save the cooking water is the frugal heart of the dish, and it remains the best reason to make it this way.