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Asparagus Soup
I bundle of asparagus, 3 even tablespoonfuls of flour, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 quart of milk, Salt and pepper to taste.
Wash the asparagus, throw it into a saucepan of boiling salted water, boil gently thirty minutes. Take from the water, cut off the tops and put them into a soup tureen. Put the milk on to heat in a double boiler. Press the asparagus through the colander. Rub the butter and flour together, add the milk and stir continually until it thickens. Then add the asparagus that has been pressed through a colander, take at once from the fire, add the salt and pepper and pour over the tops in the tureen.
Canned asparagus may be used for the soup, but must
A plain cream-of-asparagus in the old style: a milk-thickened base with the tender tips reserved whole and the stalks pushed through a sieve. The text breaks off mid-sentence at the note on canned asparagus.
- The hingeThe puree goes in at the very last moment and the pan comes off the fire at once. Asparagus puree held over heat in milk turns grey-green and flat, and the flour base can catch. Have the tureen warmed and the tips already in it before you thicken.
- Thirty minutes is too longA bundle of modern asparagus is tender in 4 to 8 minutes depending on thickness. Pull the tips out early and set them aside, then let the tougher stalk ends keep boiling until soft enough to sieve, which may take 15 to 20 minutes.
- A bundle of asparagusThe recipe gives no weight, and period bundles varied in size, perhaps around a pound and a half to two pounds. One or two supermarket bunches, about 1 to 1 1/2 lb, gives a soup of the right body for a quart of milk.
- Rub the butter and flour togetherThis is a raw roux, worked cold into a paste, then whisked into hot milk. One tablespoon of butter to three of flour is short on fat by modern habit; use 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter and cook it with the flour for a minute or two if you would rather avoid a pasty taste.
- Press through the colanderThe sieve needs to be fine enough to hold back the strings. A food mill or a fine mesh strainer does the same work; a blender plus a strainer is faster and loses nothing.
- Save the cooking waterThe recipe discards it. A cup of the asparagus liquor stirred into the milk base sharpens a soup that is otherwise very mild, and it lets you thin the purée without dulling it further.
- Double boilerUsed only to keep the milk from scorching. A heavy saucepan over low heat, watched, does the job in less time.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the purée makes about 5 cups, four modest first-course servings.
Asparagus soup of this kind belongs to the long American run of "cream soups" built on a flour-and-butter thickening and a quart of milk, a formula repeated across many vegetables in books of the 1880s to 1910s. The reserved tips are the one flourish: asparagus was an expensive spring vegetable, sold in tied bundles, and putting the whole tips in the tureen let the cook show what had gone into a soup that otherwise looked like white sauce. The unfinished note about canned asparagus is telling in itself. Canned asparagus was available by the turn of the century, common enough that the book had to acknowledge it.