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Boiled Asparagus
Wash the asparagus carefully in cold water, and peel the white ends; throw each stalk as soon as finished into cold water. When ready to cook, tie into small bundles and throw into a kettle of boiling water. Add a teaspoonful of salt; boil twenty minutes.
While the asparagus is boiling, toast squares of stale bread, cut off the crusts; butter the toast while hot and put it on a heated platter. When the asparagus is done, drain, cut the strings, and place it on the toast, heads all one way.
Put a tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan to melt, add to it one level tablespoonful of flour; mix until smooth, add a half pint of water in which the asparagus was boiled, stir continually until smooth and boil. Season it with a
A plain white-sauce asparagus on toast, of the sort that turned up at lunch and supper tables around 1900. The text breaks off mid-sentence in the original printing, so the seasoning of the sauce is left to the cook.
- Twenty minutes is far too longModern asparagus, even thick spears, is done in 3-5 minutes in boiling water; pencil-thin spears need barely 2. Twenty minutes gives the grey, collapsing asparagus that older cookbooks took for granted. Boil until a knife slips into the thickest part with slight resistance, then drain at once.
- Why the old timing existedWhy the old timing may have existed -- Asparagus of this period was often thicker-stemmed and some days old by the time it reached a kitchen, with a genuinely woody lower stalk, which would help explain both the peeling and the long boiling. Snapping the stems where they break naturally does the same job now.
- Peeling the white endsWorth doing only on thick spears with a pale, fibrous lower third. Use a vegetary peeler from just below the tips downward. Thin spring asparagus needs no peeling at all.
- Tying into bundlesUseful if you want the heads to stay intact and all face one way on the platter; kitchen twine, four to six spears per bundle. A wide sauté pan with an inch of water, lid on, works as well and lets you lift the spears out flat.
- A half pint of cooking waterThat is one cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour it makes a thin pouring sauce, which is what the recipe wants over toast. For something that coats, use three-quarters of a cup.
- Finishing the broken-off sauceThe page ends mid-instruction. Salt, white pepper and a squeeze of lemon are the period-appropriate finish; a spoonful of cream or an egg yolk beaten in off the heat was also common in books of this date.
- The toastStale bread is specified, most likely because it toasts firm and stands up better under the sauce. Cut thick, toast dry and hard, butter while hot, and warm the platter -- cold toast under hot asparagus is the usual failure here.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; on a pound of asparagus and four squares of toast it will serve two as a light main course or four as a side.
Asparagus on buttered toast with a white sauce was standard middle-class fare in Britain and America through the nineteenth century, and asparagus was one of the few genuinely seasonal luxuries a household could count on each spring. The toast is not decoration: it absorbed the water that inevitably ran out of boiled asparagus and kept the dish from flooding. The sauce here is a plain white sauce built on the cooking liquid rather than milk thrifty, and a habit that runs through this whole class of vegetable cookery, where the pot water was treated as an ingredient rather than something to be poured away. The name derives, by way of Latin, from Greek asparagos, and English kitchens long called it "sparrow-grass," a folk reshaping that lingered in market talk well into the Victorian period.