Home › Cookery › To Cook Asparagus
To Cook Asparagus
As soon as you get the asparagus from market or your garden, throw into salt and water, after scraping the outer skin and tying up in bunches. Put on to boil one hour before dinner. After boiling thirty minutes, drain, cut in pieces half an inch long, and put in the saucepan with enough milk to cover them. Just before serving, add one tablespoonful fresh butter, in which one teaspoonful flour has been rubbed. Season with salt and pepper.--Mrs. S. T. To Cook Asparagus.
Wash well, scrape, cut off the tough end, tie up in bunches and put in boiling water with a spoonful of salt. Boil thirty minutes or till tender. Lay it on slices of toast in a dish, pour melted butter over it, and serve hot.--Mrs. P. W.
Two versions from two contributors: one creamed, one on toast. Both hinge on a boiling time that no modern cook would follow.
- The thirty minutesHalf an hour of boiling reduces asparagus to grey threads. Modern spears need 3-5 minutes for thin ones, 6-8 for thick, until a knife slips into the base with slight resistance. In the first recipe, that means the whole boil-then-simmer-in-milk sequence should be compressed to a few minutes total rather than the hour the writer allots before dinner.
- Scraping the skinNineteenth-century asparagus was often thick, field-grown and genuinely tough-skinned, so peeling the lower stalk was standard. With today's slimmer market spears, snap or trim the woody base and skip the peeling entirely unless the stalks are jumbo.
- The salt-and-water soakThis was probably for freshness and to draw out insects from garden-cut spears. Grit is the real concern now: rinse well, paying attention to the tips, where sand collects. A cold soak does no harm but is not necessary.
- Tying in bunchesBundling with kitchen twine lets you lift the whole lot out at once and keeps the tips above the most violent boiling. Still a sound method, and worth doing if the pot is deep.
- The butter and flourA tablespoon of butter rubbed with a teaspoon of flour is a beurre manié — it thickens the milk into a light sauce as it melts in. Stir it in off a hard boil and let it bubble gently for a minute so the flour loses its raw taste.
- \"Melted butter\" in the second recipeIn books of this period the phrase often means a thin flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan. Either reading works here; plain melted butter with salt, pepper and a little lemon is the simpler choice.
- ToastUse a firm bread, toasted dry and dark enough to survive the liquid. Untoasted or soft sandwich bread collapses under hot buttered asparagus within a minute.
- YieldNeither version gives quantities. Reckon about a pound of asparagus for three to four people as a side dish, roughly a pound and a half if it is the main event on toast, and enough milk in the first recipe just to cover the cut pieces — around a cup per pound.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is a collection of contributions from Virginia housewives, which is why the same dish appears twice under two sets of initials — Mrs. S. T. and Mrs. P. W. each sent in her own way of doing it, and the editor printed both. Asparagus on toast was one of the standard genteel spring dishes of the period on both sides of the Atlantic; the vegetable was cut from established garden beds that took several years to come into bearing. The long boiling times in these entries were not carelessness but convention: nineteenth-century cookery books routinely treated green vegetables as needing twenty to forty minutes, and the fashion for brief cooking and bright color belongs largely to the twentieth century.