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Chafing-dish Dainties (Reserve the tips until)
reserve the tips until the other pieces are partially cooked, or, being more tender, they will become broken while the others are still uncooked. Make a sauce of the butter, flour, salt, paprica, and water in which the asparagus was cooked, or use half a cup of cream in the place of part of the asparagus liquor. When the sauce boils, add the asparagus and mix lightly with the sauce; break the eggs, one after another, into a cup and slide them carefully on to the top of the asparagus. Season with a sprinkling of salt and pepper, and, if desired, a grating of nutmeg. Set the blazer into the bath and put on the cover. When the eggs are nicely poached, remove the eggs, with the asparagus below, on to rounds of toasted and buttered bread.
This page picks up mid-recipe — asparagus with poached eggs built in a chafing dish — so the ingredient list and quantities sit on the preceding page. What survives here is the method, which is sound and still worth following.
- The blazer and the bathThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of the chafing dish; the bath is the water-filled pan beneath it. Setting the blazer into the bath turns the whole thing into a double boiler, which is the point: the eggs poach in gentle steam rather than on direct heat. A wide saute pan set over a larger pan of simmering water does the same job.
- Missing quantitiesWith the top of the recipe absent, no amounts are given for butter, flour or asparagus. A thin white sauce of this era runs about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to a cup of liquid, which would suit a sauce that does not stiffen around the eggs.
- PapricaAn older spelling of paprika. In 1900 this generally meant sweet Hungarian paprika used as a mild seasoning and for colour, not the smoked variety.
- The asparagus liquorThe cooking water is used deliberately as the sauce base, so do not salt it heavily or discard it. Substituting half a cup of cream for part of it, as offered, gives a noticeably richer result.
- Tips lastThe hinge of the method. Asparagus tips cook in a fraction of the time the stalks need, and adding everything at once leaves you with mush at one end and raw stems at the other. Cut the stalks into short lengths, give them a head start, then drop the tips in for the last two or three minutes.
- Sliding in the eggsBreaking each egg into a cup first lets you check it and lets you place it without breaking the yolk on the pan rim. Set them apart from one another so the whites do not knit into a single sheet.
- How long to poachCovered over the water bath, the eggs will take roughly 6 to 10 minutes depending on the depth of the sauce and how hard the bath is simmering. Pull them when the whites are set and the yolks still move under a light touch; steam heat is forgiving but not infinitely so.
- ServingLift each egg with the asparagus beneath it onto its round of buttered toast, and spoon any remaining sauce over. Reckon one or two eggs per person and have the toast cut and buttered before the eggs go in, since the dish will not wait.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American households around 1900, and books like this one aimed squarely at it: the equipment let a hostess cook at the table in a parlour or a bedsitter, and it suited the growing number of people living without a full kitchen or a cook. Asparagus with poached eggs belongs to a family of light supper and luncheon dishes — creamed things on toast — that the chafing dish handled better than almost anything else, since the water bath made curdling and scorching hard to achieve. The word blazer for the upper pan, now nearly obsolete outside these books, distinguished the pan that sat over the flame from the hot-water pan below, and recipes of the period routinely instruct the cook either to set the blazer directly over the flame or to lower it into the hot-water pan as the heat required changes.