Home › Salads › Asparagus Salad
Asparagus Salad
Drain and rinse stalks of canned asparagus. Cut rings from a bright red pepper one-third inch wide. Place three or four stalks in each ring. Arrange on lettuce leaves and serve with French Dressing, to which has been added onehalf tablespoon tomato catsup.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one, so the only real work is in the sourcing and the dressing. A few of Farmer's assumptions need translating.
- Canned asparagusCanned asparagus of the period tended to be soft and fully cooked in the tin, which is why it drains and rinses rather than cooks. Modern canned spears behave much the same way; if you use fresh, boil or steam until just tender, then chill, so the stalks are still firm enough to slide through a pepper ring.
- The red pepper"Bright red pepper" here means a sweet bell pepper, not a chili. Cut it crosswise so you get whole rings, and take them from the widest part of the pepper so three or four spears fit without splitting the ring.
- Rinsing mattersThe brine in canned asparagus is assertive and will flatten the dressing. Drain, rinse under cold water and blot dry on a towel, or the French dressing will slide off and pool on the lettuce.
- French DressingIn this book that means a simple dressing of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, the book's own proportions being twice as much oil as vinegar. Not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name today.
- CatsupHalf a tablespoon of tomato ketchup stirred into the dressing adds sweetness, acid and color. Period catsups varied in body and sweetness, so start with less and taste.
- ServingThe original gives no yield. Figure one ring of three or four spears per person as a first course or luncheon salad, arranged on lettuce leaves.
- Assemble lateDress at the table or immediately before serving. Asparagus sheds water and lettuce collapses under vinaigrette within a few minutes.
Salads of this kind belong to the era when canned goods were a mark of modern convenience rather than a compromise, and when a salad course was judged largely on how neatly it was constructed. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is full of these small architectural arrangements: ingredients bound in rings, cups and cases so they arrive on the plate looking deliberate. Canned asparagus made the dish possible year-round in New England, where the fresh season is a matter of weeks in late spring, and a pepper ring supplied the color that pale canned spears lack. The spoonful of ketchup stirred into the vinaigrette is a period habit rather than a Farmer invention; bottled tomato catsup was a standard pantry item by the 1890s and turns up throughout American cookbooks of the time as an all-purpose seasoning — a habit that some have seen foreshadowing the Thousand Island and "Russian" dressings that would become fixtures a generation later, though the origins of both are disputed.