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Asparagus Salad
One bundle of boiled asparagus, French dressing.
Cut the tender parts of asparagus into pieces of equal length and tie them in bunches, then cook them in boiling salted water and leave them to get cold. A few minutes before serving put the asparagus into a salad bowl, and pour over it French dressing.
A two-ingredient dish that lives or dies on timing: the asparagus must be barely cooked, thoroughly cold, and dressed at the last moment.
- One bundleA market bunch commonly runs around a pound or so, enough for a small salad course. The recipe uses only the tender upper stalks, so a fair proportion of the weight is trimmed away.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn cookbooks of this period French dressing is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. A little Dijon or a few drops of lemon are within the period idiom.
- Tying in bunchesThe bundles keep the spears straight and let you lift them all out at once. Kitchen twine around the tips and again near the cut ends is enough; the point is retrieval, not presentation.
- Cooking timeThe original gives none. Thin spears need 2 to 3 minutes in well-salted boiling water, thick ones 4 to 5. They should bend slightly under their own weight and no more.
- Cooling"Leave them to get cold" on a platter will dull the colour and continue the cooking. Plunge the bunches into ice water, then drain on a towel so no water thins the dressing.
- Dress at the last minuteThe instruction to dress a few minutes before serving is the hinge of the recipe. Acid dulls the green of asparagus and draws out water fairly quickly, leaving drab, slack spears sitting in liquid.
- ServingServe cold but not straight from the refrigerator; the flavour is flat at fridge temperature. Chopped hard-boiled egg is a common accompaniment of the period if you want one.
Asparagus arrived in American kitchens as a spring luxury — field-grown, available for a few weeks in spring, and expensive enough that cookbooks of the early 1900s treated a single bundle as the basis of a whole course. Its appearance in a collection of salads reflects the era's enthusiasm for the salad as a separate course served after the roast, a habit generally traced to French table practice and much promoted in English and American household books of the period. The dressing named in the recipe carries the same borrowing: "French dressing" was simply the plain oil-and-vinegar mixture, distinguished from the boiled and mayonnaise dressings that dominated American salad-making, and light enough not to smother anything green and delicate.