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Asparagus (Cut off the woody part)
Cut off the woody part of the asparagus and scrape the lower ends of the stalks, or cut off all but the very tender part, saving the pieces for cream of asparagus soup. Wash the stalks and tie them in bunches; place them upright, stem end down in a deep saucepan. Pour in boiling water sufficient to come up to the tender heads but not to cover them; add a teaspoon of salt for each quart of water and place the saucepan where the water will boil. Cook until tender, leaving the cover partly off. It will take from fifteen to thirty minutes according to the age of the asparagus. Serve on thin slices of buttered toast, seasoning with butter, pepper and salt, or pouring drawn butter or cream sauce over all. Save the water for vegetable soup.
If preferred, all the tender part of the asparagus may be cut into short pieces, boiled in water sufficient to cover, and served in cream sauce or in a little of the water in which it is cooked, seasoned with salt, pepper and butter.
A sound method with one badly outdated number: modern asparagus, cut young and moved fast, needs a fraction of the time given here.
- Timing is the hingeFifteen to thirty minutes will reduce today's asparagus to grey threads. Thin spears want 2 to 4 minutes in boiling water, thick ones 4 to 8, and they should still have some resistance at the base when you pull them out.
- Why uprightThe technique is not fussiness. Standing the bunch stem-down in shallow boiling water steams the delicate tips while the tough butts actually boil, so both finish at once. A tall narrow saucepan or the bottom of a stockpot works; the lid propped ajar, as the recipe directs, is traditionally said to help keep the colour bright.
- Tying the bunchesTwo loops of kitchen string, one near the butts and one below the tips, let you lift the whole lot out at the moment it is done rather than fishing for spears.
- SaltA teaspoon per quart is on the light side for vegetable water. A tablespoon of kosher salt per quart is a common modern figure, and seasons the stalks as they cook.
- Drawn butterIn a book of this period this means melted butter thickened with a little flour and the cooking liquid, closer to a thin sauce than to clarified butter. Cream sauce is a plain béchamel.
- TrimmingRather than measuring, bend each spear until it snaps; the break is commonly said to fall where the fibre begins, though where it lands depends on how you hold the spear. Scraping the lower stalk with a peeler is still worth doing on spears thicker than a thumb.
- The saved water and trimmingsBoth are genuinely useful. Asparagus butts simmered 20 minutes and strained give a stock with real flavour, and it is the base of the cream of asparagus soup the recipe points you toward.
- YieldReckon a pound of asparagus for two people as a side dish, or one bundle per person served over toast as a light lunch course.
Serving boiled asparagus over buttered toast, as here, is often said to have been common practice in British and American cooking from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s: the bread caught the liquid the spears gave up and made a short-season luxury stretch to feed a table. The upright bunch method appears in Victorian and Edwardian manuals, though those manuals also boil asparagus lying flat, and the method survives in the tall, narrow asparagus kettles of the period. Asparagus itself was a spring vegetable in the strictest sense before refrigerated freight, available for a few weeks and then gone, which explains the careful instructions to save the tender pieces beyond the woody part, and the cooking water for soup. The long cooking times given in books of this era reflect field-to-table gaps measured in days rather than hours, and possibly a taste for softer vegetables than we hold now.