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Asparagus Peas
Scrape the scales from the stalks of asparagus and cut the tender portions into pieces one-fourth an inch long. Cook in boiling salted water until tender; drain, and keep the peas hot. For three cups of peas make one cup of drawn-butter sauce, using as liquid the water in which the asparagus was cooked, or white stock. Add the peas to the sauce; beat the yolks of two eggs, add half a cup of cream, and stir into the sauce and peas; add, also, one tablespoonful of butter. Serve on croutons of fried bread, or in cases made of shreddedwheat biscuit.
A chafing-dish dish that turns asparagus tips into a mock pea ragout, bound with a drawn-butter sauce and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The finish is the whole trick.
- Never let it boil after the yolks go inEgg yolks and cream stirred into a hot sauce will curdle at a simmer. Temper the yolk-cream mixture with a ladle of the hot sauce first, return it off the heat, and cook only until it thickens slightly; if you are working over a chafing dish, set the blazer pan over hot water rather than directly over the flame.
- Drawn butter sauceNot melted butter. It is the period name for a simple white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour, then a cup of the asparagus cooking water or light white stock whisked in and simmered a few minutes. The final tablespoon of butter is stirred in raw at the end for gloss.
- How much asparagusThree cups of quarter-inch pieces will take something in the region of two pounds of untrimmed asparagus, since only the tender upper stalk is used. Save the trimmings for stock rather than the sauce liquid, which should stay pale and sweet.
- Scraping the scalesThis was written for thick, sandy, field-grown asparagus. Modern supermarket spears rarely need more than a rinse; peel only the lower stalk of very thick asparagus, and snap or cut off the woody base.
- Cook it shortPeriod recipes commonly boiled asparagus for fifteen or twenty minutes; this one just says 'until tender.' Quarter-inch pieces need only a few minutes in boiling salted water — they should still be bright green, since they get more heat in the sauce.
- Shredded wheat casesThe original refers to the large pillow-shaped biscuit, which was hollowed out and crisped in the oven to make an edible cup. Today's smaller biscuits do not hollow well; fried or toasted bread croutons are the more practical of the two options given.
- YieldServes four as a light supper course, or six as a first course on croutons.
The conceit here is frugality dressed as novelty: asparagus cut small enough to pass for green peas, a trick that appears in English and American cookery books through the nineteenth century under names like "asparagus peas." It made use of the tender mid-stalk that would otherwise go to the stockpot. The chafing dish itself was at the height of its vogue around 1900, when it let a hostess cook at the table without a servant, and books of this kind are full of exactly this sort of dish: cut small, sauced, and served on something crisp. The shredded wheat case is a suggestive period detail: the biscuit was a new industrial product then, and cookbook writers were busy finding uses for it beyond breakfast.