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Asparagus Salad
Prepare the asparagus as before, discard the lower part of the stalk, cut the remainder in inch pieces, and serve on lettuce, with either mayonnaise or French dressing. Some people consider that only the tips of the asparagus are suitable for this salad.
A composed salad rather than a set of instructions, and it depends entirely on a step the book gives elsewhere: the asparagus is boiled first, then cooled. A few notes on filling in what the original assumes.
- "Prepare the asparagus as before"This points back to the book's earlier asparagus entry, where the spears are boiled and then cooled. Modern practice is 2 to 4 minutes in heavily salted boiling water for thin spears, 4 to 6 for thick, then straight into ice water. Period recipes commonly called for 20 to 30 minutes, which gives the olive-drab, collapsing asparagus the salad cannot survive.
- The hinge: dry the spearsAsparagus holds water in its cut ends and between the bracts of the tip. Drain on a towel and blot before dressing, or the vinaigrette slides off and the mayonnaise breaks into a puddle on the lettuce.
- Discarding the lower stalkRather than cutting to a guessed length, snap each raw spear where it breaks naturally, or peel the bottom two inches of thick spears with a vegetable peeler and keep them. The woody portion is fibre, not flavour.
- French dressing, 1911 senseIn cookery of this period French dressing means plain oil-and-vinegar seasoned with salt and pepper, commonly in the region of three parts oil to one of vinegar, though books of the day vary. It is not the sweetened orange-red bottled dressing that took the name later in the century.
- MayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise here contains uncooked yolk. That is unremarkable in a kitchen recipe, but if serving the very young, elderly, or immunocompromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice.
- Serve cold, dress lateChill the asparagus thoroughly and dress it at the table or immediately before. Acid in the dressing dulls the green fairly quickly.
- YieldReckon on a pound of asparagus, roughly 16 to 20 medium spears, for four salads. If you follow the note about using tips only, you will need considerably more.
Asparagus salad belongs to a moment when the salad course was moving out of the realm of lettuce-and-vinegar and into the cold cooked vegetable, a shift often attributed to French restaurant practice and to the arrival of reliable canned and long-distance fresh produce, though the causes are not settled. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in 1911 as part of a broader line of household guidance aimed at middle-class women running kitchens with little or no hired help, which is why the instruction is so compressed: the reader is expected to have already learned to boil asparagus a few pages earlier and to have a bowl of mayonnaise on hand. The final sentence, on tips only, is a quiet nod to fashionable practice; asparagus tips were generally regarded as the elegant portion.