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Asparagus with Cream
Cut into small pieces a bunch of asparagus and put in a saucepan of boiling water and blanch for about three minutes. Then remove, drain and put into another saucepan with a small quantity of warm water, some butter, sugar, and one onion. Set the pan on the side of the fire and simmer gently for half an hour, take out the onion, add a thickening of yolk of egg and cream, stir it well and turn the whole out onto a dish. and serve.
A French-style asparagus dish finished with a liaison of egg yolk and cream. Two things need attention: the liaison must not boil, and the half-hour simmer belongs to a different kind of asparagus than you will buy today.
- The hinge: the liaisonBeat 1-2 yolks with about 1/4 cup cream, temper with a spoonful of the hot cooking liquid, then stir it in off the heat or over the barest flame. Above roughly 180F the yolk scrambles and the sauce turns grainy.
- "Side of the fire"On a coal range the pan was pulled to the cooler edge to hold below a simmer. That is your lowest burner setting, or a heat diffuser.
- The half hourThe half hour — Thirty minutes suggests coarser, thicker stalks than most asparagus sold today. Modern asparagus, blanched three minutes and then stewed for thirty, collapses into strings. Cut in 1-inch pieces, blanch two minutes, then braise 8-12 minutes in the butter and water until tender.
- A bunchRoughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb, which serves four as a side dish. Snap off the woody ends before cutting.
- Unstated quantitiesFigure 2 tablespoons butter, 1/2 teaspoon sugar and about 1/2 cup warm water for a pound of asparagus. The sugar is a seasoning, not a sweetener; it rounds the mineral edge.
- The onionA whole small peeled onion, left in to perfume the braise and lifted out before finishing. Do not chop it.
- SaltSalt — None is called for. Salt the blanching water and season the finished sauce.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a compendium of the classical French repertoire as it was actually cooked in a large American hotel kitchen. This dish is a plain liaison preparation: vegetables stewed in butter and a little water, then bound at the last moment with egg yolk and cream. Asparagus in the 1890s was a genuinely seasonal luxury, and the long gentle stewing suggests stalks coarser than much of what is sold year-round today. The instruction to set the pan "on the side of the fire" is a fossil of coal-range cooking, where heat was managed by moving the pot rather than turning a dial.