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Asparagus in White Sauce
Boil asparagus cut in one-inch pieces, drain, and add to White Sauce I, allowing one cup sauce to each bunch asparagus. Serve in Croustades of Bread for a vegetable course.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already have two other recipes from the book in front of you: White Sauce I and Croustades of Bread. Here is what they are, and where the original timing needs correcting.
- White Sauce IFarmer's version is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup scalded milk, 1/4 teaspoon salt and pepper. Cook the butter and flour together until it bubbles without browning, then add the scalded milk gradually, stirring constantly, and cook until it thickens.
- A bunch of asparagusIn this period a bunch was tied at the market and ran roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb, which after trimming gives about 1 lb of edible stalk. One cup of sauce to that quantity is a light coating, not a smothering.
- Boiling timeThe book's general asparagus directions call for a far longer boil than we would now use, which is what the era wanted. Inch-length pieces need 3 to 5 minutes in well-salted boiling water, until the point of a knife just enters. Drain at once; if the sauce is not ready, spread the pieces on a tray so they stop cooking.
- Trim, don't peelSnap or cut off the woody base before cutting into inch lengths, and add the tips to the pot a minute after the stem pieces so they do not collapse.
- Croustades of breadNot a pastry case. Cut cubes or thick rounds from a stale close-grained loaf, hollow them out leaving walls about half an inch thick, and fry in deep fat at 375F until golden, or brush with butter and bake at 400F until crisp. They can be made hours ahead.
- Season at the endThe sauce carries all the seasoning in this dish. Taste after the asparagus goes in, since the vegetable and its residual water dilute it; a scrape of nutmeg or a little lemon juice is period-appropriate and welcome.
- Yield and timingOne bunch with a cup of sauce will fill roughly four croustades, depending on their size, as a separate vegetable course. Combine and serve immediately -- the sauce dulls the asparagus colour and the fried bread softens within a few minutes of being filled.
The vegetable course served on its own, between the roast and the sweet, was a fixture of the formal American dinner Fannie Farmer was training cooks and housekeepers to produce, and asparagus was among its emblems: expensive, briefly in season, and sold tied in bunches rather than by weight. Dressing it in a flour-thickened milk sauce reflects the school's whole method, in which the numbered white sauces are building blocks to be memorised and then applied to whatever came in from the market. The fried bread croustade did the work a puff-pastry shell or a ramekin would do now -- it made a soft dish serveable at table without a spoon touching the cloth, and it used up a stale loaf, which in a household economy manual was never a small consideration.