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To Cook Asparagus
One should not let the tips of this vegetable touch the water. Take your bundle, dip the stalks in warm water to remove any dust, and the tips also, if it is necessary. Then tie the bundle round with tape, keeping the ends of stalks even so that it will stand upright. Place them in boiling water with the heads just sticking out, and keep them like that. In this way the heads, which are very tender, will be cooked in the steam and will not drop off.
A method rather than a recipe: the whole point is to boil the stalks and steam the tips, so the heads arrive intact rather than falling off into the pot.
- The hingeKeep the water level below the tips throughout. The stalk is dense and needs several minutes of boiling; the head is delicate and only wants steam, so a tall narrow pot with the bundle standing upright is the whole trick.
- Tape"Tape" here means a narrow woven cotton or linen tape of the household sewing sort, which will not cut into the stalks. Kitchen string will do instead, tied near the base and again just below the tips.
- Standing the bundleTrim the butt ends level so the bundle stands. If it will not stay up, an asparagus pot with its wire basket, or a tall saucepan with the bundle wedged against the sides, does the same job.
- PeelingThe recipe says nothing about peeling. Belgian and French kitchens of the period often used thick white or blanched asparagus, which was generally peeled from just under the head to the base. Modern thin green asparagus needs no peeling; thick spears still benefit.
- TimingThe original gives none. Thin green spears take 3-5 minutes once the water returns to the boil, thick ones 6-8, and thick peeled white asparagus 12-18. Test the base of a stalk with a knife tip, not the tip.
- Salt and afterSalt the water well. Lift the bundle out, cut the ties, and drain the spears on a folded cloth so they do not sit in water and go limp.
- Yield and servingA bundle of this kind is commonly around 1 lb, enough for two as a course, though the recipe gives no quantity. In Belgium such asparagus is often served warm with melted butter and chopped hard-boiled egg, or simply with butter and lemon.
Belgium has grown asparagus seriously since the nineteenth century, particularly the thick blanched white kind raised under mounded soil in the sandy Limburg and Mechelen districts, and it remains a fixed point of the spring table there. This book appears to have been compiled during the First World War to raise money for Belgian relief, and is generally said to gather household recipes from Belgian women in exile, which would explain its tone: no oven, no expensive garnish, just the correct handling of a good vegetable. The upright-bundle method is older than the book and standard in French and Belgian kitchens of the period, and purpose-built tall asparagus kettles were sold for it; the dressing of butter and chopped egg that usually follows is generally known abroad as asparagus in the Flemish style.