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Vegetables, or Légumes, and Salads. 141
They are served à la sauce-with white sauce; au beurre-with butter sauce; à l'huile-with oil and vinegar; à la Tartare, or à la Hollandaisewith Tartare or Hollandaise sauce. Asperges à la Piémontaise are served in white sauce with grated cheese. à l'Espagnole are served with poached eggs sprinkled with chopped herbs, and tomato sauce. This is also called à la Colbert. en Mayonnaise are served cold in Mayonnaise sauce. à la Niçoise are served cold in a sauce made of hard-boiled yolks of eggs with oil and vinegar.
Cut up small, they are dressed en petits poisstewed and served in a white sauce; as Pointes d'asperges au jus-stewed in stock; or à la crèmeserved in Béchamel sauce; à la Pompadour-in a sauce of butter, yolks of eggs, vinegar, etc.
The page opens in the middle of a sentence, and the vegetable it is talking about is asparagus. What follows is a set of hot sauces for the dinner course and cold dressings for the cold table.
- It starts mid-thought“They are served à la sauce” refers back to a previous page that is not here. Read the opening list of dressings as belonging to asparagus and the rest of the entry falls into order.
- Asparagus as a course of its ownIt came to the table as a dish in its own right, warm, with a sauce to dip into, and it was eaten with the fingers. That is why a single vegetable gets this much space and this many sauces.
- Tips and stalks, used apartPointes d’asperges, tips in white sauce, in stock, in Béchamel, are a currency that turns up as a garnish all through this book. The stalks were sauced and served as the course; the tips went into other people’s dishes. Nothing was discarded.
- Cut up like peasEn petits pois means asparagus chopped into pea-sized pieces, stewed and served in white sauce as though it were peas. It is a good use for the middle of the stalk, which most cooks now snap off and throw away.
- The Niçoise dressingHard-boiled yolks pounded with oil and vinegar into a thick cold sauce. Made carefully it is nearer to a gribiche than to a vinaigrette, and it is better on cold asparagus than mayonnaise is.
- Do not boil it to deathThese sauces were devised for asparagus cooked until it bent. Five or six minutes in boiling salted water, until a spear just gives at the thick end, and the sauces stop being a rescue.
Asparagus had to be grown deliberately, in a bed that takes years to establish, cut for a few weeks and then left alone. A vegetable that costly in ground and in patience does not reach a book like this because it feeds people. It reaches it because serving it said something, which is why the page can offer hot sauces for the formal dinner and cold ones for the buffet and assume a reader wants both.