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Stewed Asparagus
Wash the asparagus in cold water, cut into pieces about one inch long, rejecting all the tougher parts. Put the pieces in a kettle, covering them with boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt and boil thirty minutes; then drain in a colander. When thoroughly drained return to the kettle, dust the asparagus lightly with a tablespoonful of flour, add two ounces of butter and half a pint of cream or milk, half a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper. As soon as this comes to boiling point it is ready to serve. Do not stir it or you will break the asparagus.
A plain creamed asparagus that needs one substantial correction and a few unit conversions.
- The thirty-minute boilThis is the hinge, and it is wrong by modern standards. Inch-long pieces of asparagus are tender in three to five minutes in salted boiling water; thirty minutes reduces them to grey threads. Cook until the pieces just yield to a knife tip, then drain.
- "Kettle"In turn-of-the-century American usage this means a deep saucepan or stockpot on the range, not a tea kettle. Any wide pan that holds the asparagus in a shallow layer works better, since it comes back to the boil faster.
- Half a pint of cream or milkOne cup. Cream gives a sauce that clings; whole milk with the tablespoon of flour will be quite thin, closer to a moistening than a coating.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, half a stick. With only a tablespoon of flour this is a very loose butter-and-cream liaison rather than a proper white sauce, and it will look broken if held long. Serve it straight away.
- SaltA teaspoon in the cooking water plus another half teaspoon in the sauce is generous by present habits, particularly if the butter is salted. Season the sauce at the end instead of by the measure.
- Do not stirTake this literally. Shake or swirl the pan to distribute the flour and cream; a spoon will snap the cooked spears. Dusting the flour over drained, still-hot asparagus lets it hydrate without lumping.
- Trimming"Rejecting all the tougher parts" means the woody butts. Snap each spear where it breaks naturally, or peel the lower third of thick spears and use the whole stalk.
- YieldNo quantity of asparagus is given. As a rough guess, something in the region of a pound to a pound and a half of trimmed spears would suit this amount of butter and cream, enough for about four as a side dish.
Creamed asparagus belongs to a long American tradition of finishing boiled vegetables with butter, flour and milk, the same treatment given to peas, onions and new potatoes in nineteenth-century household cookery. Asparagus was a market-garden crop grown around cities such as Boston and Philadelphia, and California's Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, around Stockton, became a major producing area somewhat later; its short spring season made it a minor luxury worth dressing richly. The long boil here is characteristic of the period rather than of the vegetable: cookbooks of the era routinely gave vegetables twenty minutes or more, a habit often linked to ideas about digestibility and to the difficulty of judging heat on a coal range.