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Asparagus Soup
The desired number of asparagus heads should be picked, scraped and thoroughly washed, the tops being broken off as far down the stalks as possible. Cook in boiling salt water for about twenty minutes. Put the stalks into some good veal stock and boil for twenty minutes. Then cut an onion into thin slices, and fry in three tablespoonfuls of butter for ten minutes, being careful not to allow it to burn, and add a portion of the asparagus tips. Cook for a few minutes, stirring gently; add a little flour, and continue the cooking for a few minutes longer. Remove the stalks from the stock, pour in the contents of the frying pan and boil all together for twenty minutes. Then rub through a sieve. Have ready boiling a pint of milk and a pint of cream, and add to the stock. Season well with salt and pepper and serve.
Oscar writes for a brigade cook who already knows the proportions, so the quantities are left almost entirely open. The structure is sound: the woody stalks flavour the stock and are thrown out, the tips carry the flavour and colour into the finished soup.
- Working quantitiesFor the pint of milk and pint of cream called for, plan on about 2 quarts of veal stock and 2 lb of asparagus, which yields roughly 3 quarts of soup, or 8 to 10 servings. Halve everything for a household batch.
- The twenty-minute boilTwenty minutes in salted water was normal for the period and will leave the tips olive-drab and mushy. Modern practice is 4 to 6 minutes for the tips, then straight into ice water; reserve a handful of whole tips as garnish and add them at the end.
- Two separate cookingsNote that the stalks and the tips are handled differently. The tough lower stalks go into the stock purely to flavour it and are lifted out and discarded; only the tender tops are cooked in butter and go through the sieve.
- Veal stockA light veal stock is neutral and slightly gelatinous, which is why it was the house base. A good unsalted chicken stock is the nearest supermarket equivalent; vegetable stock works but the soup will taste thinner.
- The flour"A little flour" means enough to bind 3 tablespoons of butter, so about 2 to 3 tablespoons. Cook it in the butter and onion for a couple of minutes before the liquid goes in or the soup will taste pasty.
- SievingA blender or immersion blender does the work in seconds, but still pass the puree through a fine sieve afterward. Asparagus is full of fibrous strings that no blender fully breaks down.
- Adding the dairyScald the milk and cream and add them at the end, off a hard boil. Once the dairy is in, hold the soup just below a simmer; boiling it will curdle the cream and dull the green.
- SeasoningSeason only after the cream goes in. The stock is boiled twice more after it is made -- once with the stalks, once with the contents of the frying pan -- and can concentrate enough to end up salty on its own; a little lemon juice at the table lifts the flavour, though Oscar does not mention it.
Asparagus soup belongs to the standard repertoire of the late nineteenth-century hotel kitchen, where it appeared as a crème d'asperges or purée on spring menus and made economical use of a costly vegetable. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, published The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896 as a very large compendium of just this sort of professional formula, written in loose prose rather than in measured lists because the readers he had in mind were expected to know their proportions. The reliance on veal stock as an all-purpose neutral base is the clearest marker of the era's French-trained hotel cooking, and it is the ingredient a modern home cook is least likely to have on hand.