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Asparagus Toast
Cut cold, boiled asparagus into half-inch bits with a silver knife; if the supply is plentiful only the tips need be used. For 1 pint, toast 6 or 8 thin slices of stale bread and keep warm. In a saucepan mix 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 tablespoonful of flour, 1/2 of a teaspoonful of salt and ¼ of a teaspoonful of white pepper. Stir in gradually 1 cupful of hot milk. When thick and smooth simmer for five minutes, then add the prepared asparagus and draw to the side of the fire, or stand over hot water until the asparagus is heated. Dip each slice of toast, for an instant, in slightly salted boiling water, spread on a hot platter and pour the contents of the saucepan over it.
A creamed-asparagus dish built on a small white sauce, designed to stretch leftover boiled asparagus across six or eight people. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are the sauce ratio and the odd business with the toast.
- The silver knifePeriod cookbooks call for silver blades to avoid the greyish staining and metallic taste that carbon-steel knives were said to leave on cut vegetables and fruit. Any stainless knife does the job now, and the instruction can be ignored.
- QuantitiesThe recipe works to a pint of cut asparagus; the weight of spears needed will vary considerably depending on whether the whole stalk or only the tips are used. The sauce is 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and 1 cup hot milk, which gives a thin pouring consistency; the salt and pepper amounts in this text are garbled, so season to taste, starting with about half a teaspoon of salt.
- Cook the roux before the milkThe original mixes butter and flour cold and adds milk gradually. Melt the butter and cook the flour in it for a minute or two first, over low heat, or the sauce will taste of raw flour no matter how long it simmers.
- Simmer five minutes, then stopFive minutes is right for the sauce alone. Once the asparagus goes in, warm it through only. Already-boiled asparagus reheated at a simmer turns olive-drab and stringy within a few minutes.
- Dipping the toastThe recipe gives no reason for the dip; the likely purpose is to soften the surface so the toast takes the sauce rather than shedding it, without going to pulp. An instant means an instant -- hold the slice with tongs and let it drain before it hits the platter.
- Stale bread is the pointFresh bread collapses in the water dip. Use day-old bread, sliced thin, toasted dry and kept warm in a 200F oven while the sauce finishes.
- YieldSix to eight slices, so four as a light supper or eight as a first course. It must go to the table immediately; the toast softens fast under the sauce.
Creamed vegetables on toast were the backbone of American light suppers and luncheons from the 1880s through the 1920s, when a cup of white sauce could make a modest quantity of anything feed a table. Asparagus was a brief, expensive spring crop in most markets, and a thrifty cook would naturally treat it as something to be extended rather than served plain with butter -- hence the note that only the tips need be used when supply allows, and by implication the whole stalk when it does not. The salted-water dip for toast appears in a number of period cookbooks under dishes of this kind; it is generally understood as a way of keeping crisp toast from repelling the sauce, a small technique that has largely dropped out of use along with the dish itself.