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Asparagus Salad (Cut cold cooked asparagus into)
Cut cold cooked asparagus into pieces an inch long, mix lightly with cream dressing and serve, in individual portions, on curly lettuce leaves.
A three-line assembly recipe that assumes you already have cooked asparagus and a jar of cream dressing on hand. Both assumptions need filling in.
- Cream dressingIn books of this period the term covers a range: sometimes a cooked dressing thickened with egg and flour or cornstarch, finished with cream and sharpened with vinegar or lemon (closer to a boiled dressing than to mayonnaise), sometimes a simple uncooked mix of cream, vinegar, sugar and salt. A thin homemade mayonnaise loosened with heavy cream, or a creme fraiche whisked with lemon and salt, stands in well. It should coat, not pool.
- Cooking the asparagusBoil or steam trimmed spears 3 to 5 minutes depending on thickness, until a knife tip slides in with slight resistance, then plunge into ice water. Turn-of-the-century recipes routinely gave 20 to 30 minutes, which produces the grey, collapsing asparagus this salad does not want.
- Dry it thoroughlyThis is the hinge. Asparagus holds water in the tips and along the cut ends, and any of it left behind will break the dressing into a watery film on the plate. Drain on a towel and chill uncovered before dressing.
- Mix lightlyCut spears bruise and shed liquid when stirred. Fold with a spatula two or three times, or spoon the dressing over the arranged pieces rather than tossing at all.
- Curly lettuceMost likely a loose-leaf or crinkle-edged garden lettuce rather than a heading type, chosen to hold the dressing and frame the portion. Frisee or the outer leaves of a green leaf lettuce give the same effect; iceberg does not.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 lb of asparagus dressed with 1/2 cup of dressing serves four as a first course. Assemble no more than 20 minutes before serving — dressed asparagus goes limp and weeps quickly.
Asparagus salad belongs to a moment when American hostesses were learning to serve vegetables cold and dressed, a fashion carried over from French service and pushed hard by the domestic-science writers of the 1890s and 1900s. Janet McKenzie Hill, who edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine, filled this little book with exactly this kind of composed, portioned salad: something arranged on a lettuce leaf for each guest rather than heaped in a bowl, which the period read as refinement. That the recipe treats "cream dressing" as common knowledge tells you how standard the cooked, egg-thickened salad dressing was in an American kitchen before bottled mayonnaise; the dressing recipes sit elsewhere in the same section, and the cook was expected to know them by heart. Canned asparagus was also widely available by 1900, and books of this era often assumed it — one reason the instruction is simply to cut up asparagus already cold and cooked.