Asparagus Soup
1 Bunch Asparagus 3 Cups Milk 3 Tablespoons Cornstarch 3 Tablespoons Butter 1 Teaspoon Yellow Corn Syrup Salt and Pepper to Taste Cook the asparagus in boiling salted water. Remove from liquor, cut tips into tureen and keep hot. Mash through sieve the remaining stalks. Put the milk to scald, and when hot turn into the water in which the asparagus was cooked. Rub butter and cornstarch to a cream, stir in part of the hot liquid and cook, stirring constantly, until the cornstarch is thoroughly cooked. Add the rest of the liquid, the asparagus pulp, seasoning and syrup. When boiling pour over the tips. Serve with strips of toasted bread.
A cornstarch-thickened cream soup of a type that filled the soup chapter of every early twentieth-century household book. It works, but the original leaves the two most important quantities — the size of the bunch and the volume of cooking water — entirely to the cook.
- The hinge: control the cooking liquorThe soup's body depends on the ratio of asparagus water to milk, and the recipe never says how much water to use. Cook the spears in about 3 cups of salted water in a narrow pan, then measure; you want roughly 2 cups of liquor to 3 cups of milk. Boil it down if you have more.
- A bunch of asparagusA market bunch today usually runs 1 to 1½ lb; the original gives no weight. Snap off the woody ends before cooking — the sieve will not save you from a fibrous base, and the pulp comes through grey and stringy.
- Cook the tips separatelyPull the tips out after 3 to 4 minutes so they stay green and firm; the stalks can go on another 8 to 10 minutes until soft enough to push through a sieve. Cooking everything until the stalks collapse turns the tips to mush.
- Sieve or blenderA food mill or a fine sieve gives the smooth pulp the recipe expects. A blender is faster but will not remove the fibres, so pass the purée through a sieve afterwards regardless.
- The cornstarch and butterRubbing butter and cornstarch to a cream is a cold paste, not a cooked roux, so it must be slackened with hot liquid off the heat and then simmered a good 2 to 3 minutes to lose the raw starch taste. Stir constantly; cornstarch catches and scorches faster than flour.
- The teaspoon of corn syrupThis is seasoning, not thickening. The recipe specifies yellow corn syrup — the golden, amber grade rather than the clear white one — and the small amount reads as a corrective for the slight bitterness of asparagus and the flatness of a milk base. A pinch of sugar does much the same job.
- Scalding the milkScalding meant heating to just below the boil, around 180F, when a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. It was originally done to check souring in unpasteurised milk; with modern milk it simply keeps the soup from cooling when the two liquids meet.
- Yield and servingServes four as a first course. The original asks only for "strips of toasted bread" served with the soup; it says nothing about trimming the crusts or floating them on top.
Cream soups built on a milk base and a butter-and-starch liaison were a mainstay of American home soup-making from the 1880s onward, promoted in cooking-school books as economical and quick. The technique here is a simplified cream soup rather than a stock-based sauce: no stock, no long simmer, the vegetable's own cooking water standing in for broth so that nothing is wasted. Cornstarch rather than flour is suggestive of an American recipe of the period — commercial cornstarch had been sold in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century and was widely marketed for sauces and puddings, and its neutral flavour suited a delicate vegetable. Asparagus itself was a spring luxury with a short local season before refrigerated rail shipping made it routine, which explains why a single bunch is stretched to feed a table.