Asparagus Sauce
INGREDIENTS for sauce for good-sized dish.-A mediumsized bundle of green asparagus, 1 oz. of butter, 3 green onions, a little parsley, a large lump of sugar, 4 tablespoonfuls of Tournée Sauce. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 4d.
Break the asparagus where it is tender, and after washing it put it into boiling water with salt in it to make it green.
When tender take the asparagus out, put it in cold water and drain on a cloth till all the moisture is absorbed. Put the butter, parsley and onions sliced into a pan, and afterwards lay in the asparagus and fry over a sharp fire for 5 minutes. Add salt to taste, the sugar and the sauce, and simmer for another 5 minutes; then rub through a tammy and, if not of a very good colour, add a little spinach green.
TIME. hour to boil the asparagus and make the sauce.
SEASONABLE January to July.
ASPARAGUS, STEWED.
A Victorian velouté-based purée sauce, meant to be served with veal, chicken or poached eggs rather than eaten alone. Two of the ingredients and one piece of equipment need translating before you start.
- Tournée SauceA pale veal or chicken velouté, reduced and strained, from the same family as Beeton's other white sauces. Four tablespoons of any good light chicken velouté (or a well-flavoured white stock thickened with a blond roux) will do the job.
- Rub through a tammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth twisted between two people to force sauce through. A blender followed by a fine sieve gives the same smooth result with far less trouble.
- Green onionsSpring onions or scallions, not the dry brown onion. Three is roughly a small handful; use the white and pale green parts.
- A large lump of sugarVictorian sugar was cut in lumps from a cone, so the size is not standardised; a teaspoon or so is a reasonable reading. Taken as seasoning for the asparagus rather than enough to make the sauce sweet.
- Spinach greenA green colouring extracted from spinach (the leaves pounded and pressed for their juice, the juice gently heated so the colour sets), used purely as a colourant. Modern cooks tend to skip it; if the sauce looks dull, a small handful of raw spinach in the blender does the same work.
- Keeping the colourThe cold-water plunge after boiling matters. Salted boiling water, then straight into cold water, holds the green; asparagus left to cool slowly in its own heat goes olive. The recipe's own fallback is a little spinach green.
- TimingsThe printed time line is incomplete (a fraction appears to have dropped out) but covers the boiling and the sauce together. Green asparagus needs only 2-4 minutes in the boiling water depending on thickness, and the 5 minutes of frying should be brisk but not browning -- colour in the pan means a muddy sauce.
- YieldThe recipe says only that it makes sauce for a good-sized dish. It thickens as it cools; loosen with a spoonful of stock before serving.
- Cost1s 4d was a real expense. English asparagus came in from the market gardens in late spring and early summer; the 'seasonable January to July' stretches well before that, which implies forced growth under glass or hotbed, or imported supply.
Puree sauces built on a velouté base were a staple of nineteenth-century English cookery's French borrowings, and this one follows the standard method: blanch the vegetable, sweat it in butter with aromatics, bind it with a mother sauce, force it through cloth. Asparagus was a market-garden crop around London from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the Battersea and Mortlake beds particularly well known -- but a January bundle meant forced growth under glass or manure heat, which is why the cost is worth noting. The instruction to correct the colour with spinach green is characteristic of the era, and green colourings of the same sort turn up in period recipes for herb butters and pea soups.