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Asparagus
Wash, scrape, cut off about one inch hard ends, and tie bunch with a piece of tape. Put into saucepan, cover with boiling salted water, 1 teaspoon salt to each quart of water, and boil until tender, keeping tips out of water for the first 10 minutes. Remove from water; drain well; lay on pieces of toast and serve with melted butter, cream sauce or Hollandaise Sauce.
A straightforward boiled asparagus, written when spears were thicker and cooked far longer than we would tolerate now. The technique of keeping the tips above the water is the part worth keeping.
- The hinge: tips out of the waterStalks need more cooking than tips, so the recipe stands the bundle upright with the buds steaming above the waterline. A tall narrow pot, or a wedge of crumpled foil to prop the bundle, achieves the same thing; the tips finish in the steam while the butts boil.
- TimingThe original gives no total time, only that the tips stay above the water for the first 10 minutes, so the cooking clearly ran longer than that. Medium spears are done in 4 to 6 minutes in boiling water, thin ones in 2 to 3. Test the thick end of a stalk with a knife tip rather than the middle.
- ScrapingPeeling the lower third with a vegetable peeler is worth doing on thick spears, where the skin is fibrous. Pencil-thin asparagus needs nothing but the woody end snapped or cut off.
- TapeCotton tape here is plain cotton binding, not adhesive. Kitchen twine does the job; tie the bundle in two places so it does not slump.
- SaltOne teaspoon per quart is a light hand by current standards. A tablespoon per quart seasons the spears properly in the short cooking time given above.
- DrainingAsparagus holds water in the tips and will flood the toast. Stand the drained bundle butt-down on a folded towel for a minute before untying and plating.
- YieldA standard bunch is about a pound and serves two to three as a side, or two on toast as a light course.
Asparagus on toast is often said to have been a fixture of American and British tables from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the toast is doing real work: it soaks up the butter and the water the spears inevitably release. The three sauces offered here — melted butter, cream sauce, hollandaise — mark the dish's range, from plain family supper to something fit for company. The season was also much shorter then: asparagus meant spring, and boiling a bundle whole and serving it on its own was how that brief supply was celebrated rather than stretched.