Home › Vegetables › Asparagus
Asparagus
Trim stalks to uniform length, wash and tie with soft string. Cook in boiling water until tender, keeping the tips above the water for the first ten minutes. Just before cooking is completed, salt the water. Drain, untie, and season with melted butter or butter substitute, salt and pepper.
If preferred, the asparagus may be cut into inch pieces. In this case, the stalks are put into the water ten minutes or more before the tips are added. Asparagus may be served with medium white sauce or Hollandaise sauce may be poured over it.
A straightforward method that predates the vegetable steamer: the bundle stands upright so the tough stalk ends boil while the delicate tips cook in steam. The technique still works, though the timings assume thicker, older asparagus than most markets sell now.
- The point of standing them upKeeping the tips clear of the water for the first ten minutes is the whole idea — the stalk bases need real boiling, the tips need only steam. A tall narrow pot, or a stockpot with the lid propped, does this best; foil-tented bundles in a deep saucepan work too.
- Ten minutes is too long for modern spearsPencil-thin supermarket asparagus is tender in 3 to 5 minutes total and turns to string at ten. Reserve the staged method for thick spears, half an inch or more at the butt, and start testing the stalk with a knife tip at 6 minutes.
- Salting at the endThe instruction to salt only just before the end is unexplained in the recipe; it may reflect the once-common belief that early salt toughens vegetables. In practice salting the water from the start gives better-seasoned asparagus.
- Trimming"Trim stalks to uniform length" is chiefly about evening up the bundle for tying, which in practice also removes the woody base; you can find where it ends by bending a spear until it snaps. Thick spears also benefit from peeling the lower two inches with a vegetable peeler.
- Butter substituteIn a book of this vintage this most likely means oleomargarine or a vegetable shortening. Butter is the better choice; if you want it non-dairy, good olive oil with lemon suits asparagus well.
- Medium white sauceThe standard of the period: 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg.
- Draining properlyStand the drained bundle butt-down for a minute before untying, or lay it on a folded towel. Water trapped between the spears will thin any sauce poured over it.
- YieldNot given. Reckon on a pound of asparagus for two to three people as a side dish, or a pound for two if it is the centre of a light lunch with hollandaise.
Boiled asparagus with melted butter or hollandaise was the settled polite treatment of the vegetable by the time Butterick, a pattern and magazine publisher, put out its household volume for the sewing-and-homemaking readership of the early twentieth century. Asparagus had long been a luxury crop — the beds take two or three years to come into bearing and a season of only a few weeks — and it reached city tables in tied bundles of graded, uniform spears, which is exactly what this recipe assumes when it says to trim to a uniform length and tie. The upright bundle method is often said to derive from French practice and from the tall, narrow asparagus kettles sold for the purpose in the nineteenth century, though this is conjecture; the reference to a "butter substitute" alongside butter may suggest a period when margarine had become an unremarkable pantry item in American kitchens, but it is a slender basis for dating the book.