Asparagus Soup
3 cups White Stock II or III 1 can asparagus 2 cups cold water 1 slice onion 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 2 cups scalded milk Salt and pepper Drain and rinse asparagus, reserve tips, and add stalks to cold water; boil five minutes, drain, add stock, and onion; boil thirty minutes, rub through sieve, and bind with butter and flour cooked together. Add salt, pepper, milk, and tips.
A classic cream-of-asparagus built on a white stock and a butter-flour binding rather than a purée of fresh spears. The structure is sound; only the ingredients and the vagueness of the canned measure need translating.
- White Stock II or IIIFarmer's white stocks are made from veal knuckle or a fowl, simmered with mild aromatics and no browning. A light, unsalted chicken stock is the closest modern substitute; avoid dark or heavily roasted stock, which muddies the colour.
- "1 can asparagus"The recipe gives no weight, and period can sizes varied; a modern can of roughly 14-15 oz, or a similar quantity of fresh asparagus, is a reasonable stand-in. If you use fresh asparagus, blanch the stalks rather than boiling five minutes from cold, since fresh spears have no canning liquor to boil out.
- The rinse is not fussinessCanned asparagus sits in brine, and the draining, rinsing, and five-minute boil in fresh cold water most likely exist to wash that flavour off the stalks before they meet the stock.
- Thirty minutes is for the stalks onlyThe long boil is there to extract flavour from tough stalk ends that will be sieved out anyway. The reserved tips go in at the very end, off the heat or barely simmering, so they hold their shape.
- Binding with butter and flourCook the 1/4 cup butter and 1/4 cup flour together for two or three minutes without colouring, then whisk in the hot sieved liquid gradually.
- SievingA food mill or fine sieve is what the recipe assumes, and it produces a smooth soup with the fibres left behind. A blender will purée the fibres into the soup instead, so pass it through a sieve afterward if you want the original texture.
- Scalded milkScalding once mattered for raw milk; with pasteurised milk it simply means heating it so the soup is not chilled when the milk goes in. Add it warm and do not let the finished soup boil hard, or it may separate.
- Salt and yieldThe stock carries its own salt, so season only at the end. As written this makes roughly 5 cups, or about four servings.
Cream soups of this kind are the backbone of the soup chapter in Fannie Farmer's book: a stock, a purée of vegetable, a butter-and-flour binding, and scalded milk, repeated with asparagus, celery, corn, or peas. The reliance on canned asparagus is worth noting: canned vegetables were an accepted pantry resource in a book of this period, and a canned base let the soup be made outside the short spring season for fresh spears. The insistence on a colourless white stock and an uncoloured roux is in keeping with the period's preference for pale, unclouded cream soups.