Asparagus Soup
1/2 pound asparagus 1 ounce butter 1 quart boiling water 1 1/4 ounces creme de riz 1/2 pint milk 1 teaspoon salt Pepper Trim, and scrape the asparagus, and cut off the heads. Cut the rest up roughly, and saute in butter for five minutes. Add the boiling water, and salt; cook until tender. Rub through the sieve. Return to the saucepan, add the asparagus heads, and boil for ten minutes. Mix the creme de riz with the milk; add it to the soup; cook for twenty minutes; add a little pepper, and a little more salt if necessary.
A straightforward purée soup thickened with rice flour rather than a roux. The only genuinely unfamiliar item is the crème de riz, and the only instruction worth ignoring is the long boil given to the tips.
- Crème de rizThis is finely ground rice flour, sold today as rice flour or cream of rice cereal. The 1 1/4 ounces called for is about 1/4 cup; slaked in cold milk it thickens without lumping, which is why the recipe insists on mixing it with the milk first.
- Weights and volumes1 ounce butter is 2 tablespoons. A half pint of milk is 1 cup in American measure, 10 fl oz if the book is following British practice — either works, the thicker version simply wants a little thinning. A quart of water is 4 cups in American measure, 40 fl oz (5 cups) if British.
- The tipsTen minutes of boiling will leave the heads grey and limp. Add them for the last two or three minutes of cooking instead, or blanch them separately and drop them into the finished soup so they stay green and intact.
- Sieving"Rub through the sieve" was the only way to get a smooth purée in a period kitchen. A blender does it in seconds, though asparagus stalks are fibrous enough that passing the blended soup through a sieve afterwards is still worth the two minutes.
- Scraping the stalksScraping was standard when asparagus arrived thick and field-grown with tough skin. With modern thin asparagus, snap the woody ends off and skip the scraping entirely.
- The final cookingTwenty minutes after the milk goes in is longer than rice flour needs to cook out, and dairy at a hard boil will catch. Hold it at a bare simmer and stir; ten minutes is enough to lose the raw starch taste.
- YieldRoughly a quart to a quart and a half after the cooking, serving four as a first course. Half a pound of asparagus in a quart of water makes a light, thin soup — increase the asparagus to a pound if you want it to taste emphatically of the vegetable.
Cream soups thickened with ground rice rather than flour were a standard of Anglo-French cookery from the late nineteenth century onward: rice flour gives a lighter body than a butter-and-flour roux and does not mask a delicate vegetable, which is why it turns up so often in asparagus, celery and pea soups. Where no meat stock stands behind such a soup, it needs body from somewhere, and starch plus milk was the reliable answer.