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Escalloped Asparagus
I bundle of asparagus, 2 ounces of butter, 1 pint of milk, A dash of white pepper, 6 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, I level teaspoonful of salt, ½ cup of bread-crumbs.
Trim and boil the asparagus in salted water for twenty minutes, drain; hard boil the eggs, remove the shells and chop them fine. Put a layer of the asparagus in the bottom of a baking dish, then a sprinkling of the hard boiled eggs, another layer of asparagus and a sprinkling of egg, and so continue until the dish is full; have the last layer asparagus. Put the butter in a saucepan, add the flour, mix; add the milk; stir continually until boiling. Add the salt and pepper. Pour this gently into the dish, wait.
A layered asparagus gratin bound with white sauce. The instructions break off mid-sentence at "wait" — the breadcrumbs are listed but never used, so the finish has to be reconstructed from period practice.
- The missing stepThe 1½ cups of bread-crumbs are the obvious candidate for the lost finish: most likely scattered over the sauce and baked until browned. The recipe gives no oven temperature or time, so any figures are modern guesswork — a moderate oven until the top colours is enough. Nothing in the dish is raw at that point, so the bake is only for colour and to set the sauce.
- Twenty minutes is far too longBoiled asparagus at 20 minutes collapses into grey threads, and it then goes into the oven on top of that. Three to five minutes in salted water for medium spears, until a knife just enters the base, is enough; drain well so the sauce is not thinned by water.
- A bundle of asparagusA 'bundle' is not a fixed measure; period bunches ran roughly a pound or two, but the weight varied by grower and market. Two standard supermarket bunches will fill a 9-inch baking dish in the layers described.
- The sauce2 oz butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a pint of milk is a thin béchamel by modern proportions — deliberately so, since it has to run down between the layers. Cook the flour and butter a minute before adding the milk to lose the raw taste, and add the milk gradually to avoid lumps.
- Six eggsThat is a generous amount of hard-boiled egg for one dish and it is what makes this a supper course rather than a side. Chop while still slightly warm and season the layers lightly; unsalted egg reads flat against the sauce.
- White pepperSpecified rather than black so no dark flecks show in the pale sauce. Black pepper will serve if appearance does not matter, though the two do not taste quite the same.
- AssemblyLay the spears in alternating directions in each layer so the finished dish cuts cleanly.
- YieldServes four as a light main course with bread, or six as a vegetable dish.
Escalloped — from the same root as scallop, meaning cooked in a shell or shallow dish — was a common American term for anything layered with sauce and crumbs and browned in the oven, and books of this period apply it to oysters, potatoes, tomatoes and cabbage with equal ease. Asparagus was in this period generally a spring vegetable and an expensive one, which explains why a modest quantity is stretched here with milk, eggs and crumbs into something substantial enough to serve on its own. The pairing of asparagus with hard-boiled egg and butter sauce is much older than the recipe and long predates the gratin form; it survives in the classic apprêt polonaise and in the Northern European habit of serving spring asparagus with chopped egg. Vegetable cookery manuals of this sort are often said to have become more numerous around the turn of the century, when household writers were arguing hard that vegetables deserved treatment beyond long boiling — an argument this recipe's twenty-minute asparagus shows was still being lost.