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Boiled Asparagus
Cut off lower parts of stalks as far down as they will snap, untie bunches, wash, remove scales, and retie. Cook in boiling salted water fifteen minutes or until soft, leaving tips out of water first ten minutes. Drain, remove string, and spread with soft butter, allowing one and one-half tablespoons butter to each bunch asparagus. Asparagus is often broken or cut in inch pieces for boiling, cooking tips a shorter time than stalks.
Asparagus on Toast Serve Boiled Asparagus on Buttered or Milk Toast.
A straightforward method whose only real fault is the clock: fifteen minutes will reduce modern asparagus to grey threads. The clever part — standing the bunch so the tough butts boil while the tips only steam — is worth keeping.
- Cut the time hardFifteen minutes suited the thick, field-held asparagus of the period. Pencil-thin spears need 2–3 minutes in boiling water, medium spears 4–5, and very fat ones 6–8. Test the thickest stalk with a knife tip at the base.
- Snap, don't guessThe instruction to break the stalk "as far down as they will snap" remains a useful rough test, though toughness is a gradient and the break point depends on where you bend. Save the snapped butts for stock or soup rather than discarding them.
- Tie the bunchKitchen twine around a bundle of 12–18 spears lets you stand them upright in a tall pan, butts down, tips clear of the water. A narrow saucepan with a lid works; the lid traps steam around the tips.
- Scales"Remove scales" means the small triangular leaves along the stalk, which trap grit. On tender spring asparagus a rinse is enough; on thick late-season stalks, peel the lower two inches with a vegetable peeler instead.
- Salt and colourSalt the water generously — about a tablespoon per quart. If the asparagus is to be held or served cool, draining it onto a towel avoids the watery tips a long soak in ice water can give.
- The butterA tablespoon and a half of soft butter per bunch is roughly 20 g, and it should go on while the spears are hot enough to melt it. Add lemon juice or a few grinds of pepper if you like; the book assumes butter and salt alone.
- Cut piecesIf cutting into inch lengths, add the stalk pieces first and the tips for only the last minute or so. Overcooked tips are the part that collapses into mush.
- YieldOne bunch, about a pound, serves two to three as a side. "Milk toast" in this book is toast soaked in hot seasoned milk — a soft base, not a crisp one.
Fannie Farmer's asparagus reflects a moment when the vegetable was still emphatically seasonal in New England: a few weeks in late spring, sold in tied bunches, the butts said to have been trimmed level so they could be stood in water like flowers. That bundling is why the recipe assumes a bunch as its unit of measure and why the tips-out-of-water trick is described at all — the cook was handling a whole bundle, not loose spears. Asparagus on toast, and its relatives creamed on toast or in a soup, belonged to the same household logic that put creamed chipped beef and poached eggs on toast: a slice of bread turned a small quantity of something good into a course. The long cooking time here is not carelessness so much as a different vegetable, grown to full thickness and, one presumes, some days from the field by the time it reached a city kitchen.