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Cream of Asparagus Soup No. 2
1 bundle asparagus 4 cups milk 3 tablespoons flour Salt, pepper 2 tablespoons butter Wash the asparagus, and cook in boiling salted water, boiling gently thirty minutes. Take from the water, cut off the tips, and put them into the serving dish; press the remainder through a colander.
Scald the milk, melt the butter, add the flour, and pour on gradually the scalded milk. Cook thoroughly, stirring frequently.
Add the two mixtures, reheat, season to taste, strain over tips, and serve at once.
A straightforward cream soup built on a white sauce, with the one genuinely dated instruction being the boiling time.
- Thirty minutes is far too longAsparagus cooks in 3-5 minutes for the tips and perhaps 8-10 for tough stalk ends. Boil the stalks until they are soft enough to purée, then stop; the tips only need a couple of minutes and should stay bright green rather than olive.
- "1 bundle asparagus"A market bunch today runs about 1 to 1.5 lb, which is roughly the right quantity for 4 cups of milk.
- Save the cooking waterThe recipe discards it. A cup of the asparagus liquid thinned into the finished soup adds most of the flavour that thirty minutes of boiling drove out of the vegetable.
- Colander means sievePress the cooked stalks through a fine sieve or food mill to leave the woody fibres behind. A blender purées the fibre rather than removing it, so still pass it through a sieve afterward.
- The white sauce3 tablespoons flour to 2 tablespoons butter is flour-heavy; cook the paste a minute or two before adding milk so it does not taste raw, and add the milk in stages to keep it smooth.
- Combine off high heatReheat gently once the purée and sauce are together. A milk-based soup on a hard boil will catch on the bottom of the pan and taste scorched.
- YieldAt least 5 cups, given 4 cups of milk plus the purée; serves four as a first course.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of American cookbooks published around the First World War, when meat conservation was a matter of public campaign as much as of vegetarian conviction; a great many households ate meatless meals on scheduled days. Cream soups were the workhorse of that cooking, since a milk-and-flour base turned almost any vegetable into a dish substantial enough to open a meal. The numbering of this recipe as "No. 2" indicates that the book prints more than one version of the soup. Asparagus was a spring vegetable rather than a year-round import, and the recipe puts the stalks as well as the tips to use.