Asparagus
Wash stalks, snap off all white tough part. Tie in bunch. Cook in deep kettle of boiling salted water. Stand bunch upright for the first ten minutes. Cook twenty to thirty minutes. Drain. Serve on buttered toast, spread with butter, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. White sauce or Hollandaise may be served.
The asparagus may be broken in inch pieces, cooked until tender, mixed with white sauce, and served on toast.
A straightforward method that survives intact, apart from the cooking time, which belongs to an era of thicker, older, field-grown asparagus.
- Cooking timeTwenty to thirty minutes will reduce modern asparagus to grey mush. Thin spears need 2-4 minutes in boiling water, thick ones 4-6; test with a knife tip at the base of the stalk.
- Why the bunch stands uprightThe tough bases cook in the water while the tender tips steam above it. This still works, but with today's spears the difference is a minute or two -- lay the bundle flat in a wide pan and it will cook evenly enough.
- Snapping versus peelingSnapping where the stalk breaks naturally is fast but wasteful on thick spears. Trimming an inch off and peeling the lower third with a vegetable peeler gives more edible asparagus.
- Tying the bunchKitchen string in two places, near the tips and near the cut ends, keeps the spears from scattering and makes them liftable in one motion. A wire basket does the same job.
- Salted waterSalt generously, about a tablespoon per quart. The recipe also sprinkles salt and pepper over the finished dish at the table.
- DrainingDrain thoroughly and briefly on a towel. Water clinging to the spears will soak the toast and thin any sauce laid over it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. As a rough modern guide, two pounds will serve four as a course on toast, one pound as a side dish.
- The white sauce versionThe cut-up variant is essentially creamed asparagus. Cook the pieces separately and fold them into finished sauce rather than simmering them in it, or the tips break down.
The long boiling time reflects the produce actually available: asparagus was a brief spring crop, cut thick from established beds and often several days off the field by the time it reached a city kitchen, so twenty minutes was not the excess it looks like now. Serving it over toast was a common household treatment on both sides of the Atlantic, a way of catching the butter and any liquid the spears gave up. Lowney's was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the era it padded out its confectionery pages with a full range of plain domestic cookery.