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Cream of Asparagus Soup
Wash, tie up and boil one bunch of asparagus for three-fourths hour. Cut off the tips and set aside till wanted. Put one quart of milk (or one pint of milk and one pint of white stock) on to scald in a double boiler, then press the asparagus stalks through a sieve and add them to the milk. Cook one tablespoon of butter and two tablespoons of flour together and combine with the scalded milk or stock, stir and cook until it thickens, season, add the asparagus tips and serve. Canned asparagus may be used for this soup but it must be well scalded and drained before mixing with the other ingredients.
A straightforward cream soup built on a roux and a sieved vegetable purée. Only the cooking time really needs rethinking.
- The three-quarter hour boilLong boiling of this kind is common in recipes of the period, when asparagus often arrived thick and woody and soft vegetables were the goal. Ten to fifteen minutes gives stalks tender enough to puree, and the tips need two or three minutes at most or they turn grey and stringy. Cook the tips separately and refresh them in cold water if you want them green in the bowl.
- A bunch of asparagusReckon on 1 to 1½ lb. Snap off the woody ends before tying and boiling; the sieve will catch them anyway, but you lose less pulp.
- Pressing through a sieveA blender or food processor does the work faster, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards. Asparagus fibre does not break down, and unsieved soup drinks like felt.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones blanched rather than roasted. A light chicken stock is the nearest thing on a modern shelf; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced.
- The rouxCook the butter and flour together two or three minutes over low heat so the raw flour taste goes, but do not let it colour. One tablespoon butter to two tablespoons flour is a lean roux.
- The double boilerIt is there to stop milk scorching, and it matters more once the purée is in, since vegetable solids catch quickly. A heavy-based pan over low heat with steady stirring works if you have no double boiler.
- SeasoningThe original leaves this open. Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit it; a spoonful of cream at the end enriches without loosening the body.
- Canned asparagusThe scalding and draining is presumably to rid it of the packing liquid and its tinny flavour, which would otherwise dominate the soup. The instruction still applies to canned spears today.
- YieldAbout one quart of finished soup — four first-course servings.
Cream soups of this pattern — a vegetable puree carried in scalded milk and bound with a butter-and-flour roux — were a staple of the soup chapter in American cookbooks between roughly 1890 and 1920, and they follow the French veloute and bechamel taught in the cooking schools of Boston and New York. The Butterick Cook Book came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, whose readership was largely middle-class households running on one servant or none; the recipe stretches a single expensive bunch of asparagus into four servings and offers half-milk, half-stock as an alternative. Asparagus was still a short-season spring luxury, which is why canned spears get their own line at the end. The sieve is the tell of the period — before electric blenders, puree soups meant forcing cooked vegetables through wire mesh or a food mill.