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Cream of Asparagus Soup
1 can asparagus. 2 pts. water or white stock. 1 pt. cream sauce. Cook asparagus in water ten minutes. Before putting asparagus in water, with scissors cut the tiny flowers from tips; save to put in soup when ready to serve. Press asparagus through sieve. Add to the warm sauce. Add a little grated onion if liked. When well blended, seasoned and ready to serve, add the flowers in each bowl of soup. Whipped cream is nice to put in soup just as it goes to the table. Sprinkle with tiny bits of parsley.
A canned-goods soup from the era when a sieve did the work a blender does now. The proportions are sound; the technique needs a light touch to keep it from turning pasty.
- The canPeriod canned asparagus commonly came in something like a No. 2 can, which held roughly 2 1/2 cups by volume; the drained yield would be less. A modern 14-15 oz can is the nearest thing on the shelf. Since canned asparagus is already cooked, the ten-minute simmer is really just to soften it for sieving.
- Cream sauceThe recipe assumes you know it. A medium white sauce is conventionally about 4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk, cooked until the raw flour taste is gone. This is what thickens the soup, so it should be smooth before the asparagus puree goes in.
- White stockVeal or chicken bones simmered without browning. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; if you use water instead, season more aggressively at the end.
- Do not boil after the sauce goes inDo not boil hard after the sauce goes in -- Once the flour-thickened sauce and the puree are combined, hold the soup just below a simmer. A hard boil risks scorching the milk solids on the bottom.
- SievingA blender or immersion blender replaces the sieve, but push the purée through a fine strainer afterwards anyway. Asparagus stems carry stringy fibre that no blender fully defeats.
- The reserved tipsSnipping the fine buds off before cooking and scattering them in at the table is the one genuinely good idea in the recipe. Keep them warm separately so they hold their shape.
- SeasoningCanned asparagus is usually packed in salted brine, so taste before adding any salt. White pepper, a scrape of nutmeg and the grated onion she suggests all suit it.
- YieldRoughly six cups, serving four as a first course. The whipped cream should be unsweetened and unwhipped-stiff, just to soft peaks, spooned on at the last second.
Cream soups built on a white sauce base were the backbone of American home cookery in the first decades of the twentieth century, and Mrs. Wilson's book is squarely of that school: a sauce, a purée, a stock, and a garnish added at the table. The reliance on a can is not a shortcut so much as an assumption of the period. Commercial canning had made asparagus, a short-season and expensive vegetable, available year-round to households that would otherwise have seen it for a few weeks in spring. The instruction to snip the tips off with scissors before cooking, then return them to the bowl whole, is a small piece of restraint, the delicate buds being treated as garnish rather than pulp. The whipped cream float was a common finishing touch on cream soups of the era, and it survives today mostly in the form of a swirl of plain cream.