Asparagus Soup
2 teaspoons salt a few grains cayenne 1 cup cream 2 slices onion 1 teaspoon white pepper 2 cups milk Wash asparagus if fresh and break off tips; break remainder of stalks into small pieces. Cook tips and stalks in cold water separately. When tender, drain; reserve water. Keep tips for garnishing soup. Press stalks through a purée sieve. Scald milk with onion, remove onion, add asparagus water, and thicken with flour and butter cooked together. Bring mixture to boiling point; add cream and seasonings. Pour over tips and serve.
NOTE. - If canned asparagus is used, drain, add water and cook in milk in a double boiler twenty minutes. Then drain and proceed as with fresh asparagus. 1 can artichokes 3 cups cold water 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour
The ingredient list has been scrambled in the original setting — the asparagus itself is missing from the list, and the last line ("1 can artichokes 3 cups cold water 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour") has bled in from the neighbouring artichoke soup. Read the method, not the list.
- What the quantities should beThe amount of asparagus is missing entirely. For 2 cups milk and 1 cup cream, something in the region of 2 lb of fresh asparagus (or two average cans) and two to three cups of the cooking water is a reasonable guess. The 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour printed with the artichokes are the only fat and flour given; borrow them, but expect a light body and add more if you want the soup thicker.
- The hinge: cook tips and stalks separatelyThis is the whole point of the method. Both go into cold water, but the tips are tender well before the woody lower stalks, which are then pressed through a sieve. Cooked together, the tips overcook and there is nothing left to garnish with.
- Save the cooking waterThe recipe tells you to reserve it, and it carries much of the flavour. Cooking the stalks in no more water than covers them will keep the liquid from being watery.
- A purée sieveA conical chinois or a fine mesh strainer pressed with a ladle. A blender alone will not do it — asparagus stalks are full of fibre that must be left behind in the sieve or the soup goes stringy.
- Seasoning is heavy by modern standardsTwo teaspoons of salt and a full teaspoon of white pepper for the finished quantity of soup is a lot. Add half, taste after the cream goes in, and adjust.
- Scalding the milkBring it just to the point where bubbles form at the edge, around 180F, with the onion slices in it, then lift the onion out. The recipe does say to bring the thickened mixture to boiling point; the cream goes in afterwards, and is best added off the heat or at a bare simmer.
- The canned-asparagus noteCanned asparagus is already cooked, so the twenty minutes in milk in a double boiler is about flavouring the milk rather than tenderising. Ten minutes of gentle warming will do.
- YieldDepending on how much cooking water you add back, something over a quart; four to six as a first course.
Cream soups built on a milk base thickened with equal parts butter and flour — what a later generation would call a béchamel soup — were the backbone of the American genteel table around 1900, and cookbooks of the period run through the vegetables one by one: celery, corn, pea, asparagus, artichoke. Lowney's book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston to promote its chocolate and cocoa, carried a full general cookery section alongside the confectionery, and its soups follow the Boston Cooking School manner closely: precise level measurements, a scalded milk base, and a garnish reserved from the main ingredient. Asparagus was still strongly seasonal in the northern United States, which is why the note on canned asparagus is given equal standing — canned vegetables were what made a spring soup a year-round proposition, and cookbook writers of the era seem, on this evidence, to have treated them as a matter of course rather than a compromise.