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Asparagus (Wash the asparagus cut off)
Wash the asparagus; cut off tough ends; cover with boiling water and place in cooker for one hour. Drain off the water and cover with milk; season with salt and pepper; heat and serve.
This belongs to a chapter written for the fireless cooker, an insulated box that finished food off the stove using nothing but retained heat. The method transfers to a modern kitchen only with adjustments, because asparagus does not want an hour of anything.
- What the cooker wasA fireless cooker was a wooden or metal chest packed with insulation, into which a pot of boiling food was sealed, sometimes above a preheated soapstone or iron "radiator." Nothing was added after the lid closed; the food coasted down from boiling over the course of an hour or more.
- The nearest modern equivalentA heavy lidded pot wrapped in towels inside a cooler, or a wide-mouth vacuum flask, behaves much the same way. A slow cooker on low is not the same thing, since it keeps adding heat rather than losing it.
- The hour is the problemAsparagus is done in 3 to 6 minutes in boiling water, depending on thickness. An hour of falling heat gives you olive-drab spears that collapse when drained. If you want the flavour of this dish, treat the first stage as a brief boil rather than a long hold.
- Trimming the tough endsRather than measuring, snap each spear where it breaks naturally, or peel the lower third of thick spears with a vegetable peeler and keep the whole stalk.
- The milk stageKeep the milk below a simmer. Boiled milk poured over cooked asparagus takes on a scalded flavour.
- SeasoningSalt the boiling water, not just the milk. Asparagus cooked in plain water and seasoned afterwards tastes flat no matter how much salt goes into the sauce.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Reckon a pound of asparagus and about a cup of milk for three servings; the milk should come partway up the spears, not drown them.
Fireless cookery was a serious domestic movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century, promoted in household manuals and government bulletins as a way to save fuel, keep kitchens cool in summer, and let a cook leave the house while dinner finished itself. The manuals of the period often applied the method indiscriminately to everything from tough beef and dried beans, where long low heat genuinely helps, to tender spring vegetables like asparagus, where it does not. The dish itself, asparagus warmed in seasoned milk, is a plain version of the creamed vegetables that filled American supper tables of the period, a step short of the flour-thickened cream sauce that would have been served on toast.