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Boiled Asparagus
Have the asparagus as fresh as possible, scrape and clean, washing thoroughly and tie with a string into bundles of five or six shoots each, taking care to have the head even so that the stalks may be cut off at the bottom leaving them of equal length. Place the bundles in boiling salt and water and boil them fast without the lid until tender; this will be from twenty minutes to half an hour; then have ready some slices of toast without crust and lay them for sippets at the bottom of the vegetable dish. Take out the bundles of asparagus from the boiling water, using great care to prevent the heads from falling off. Lay them upon the toast and untie them upon it, allow the asparagus to fall so that it will be one way upon the toast, and the sippet be moistened with the water of the asparagus. Melted butter with the juice of a lemon to every pint may be served separately in a boat or poured over it. Oiled butter is sometimes served with asparagus, especially in Paris and other continental cities.
A classic English-service treatment of asparagus, written when spears were expected to be soft enough to eat with a fork and no knife. Nearly everything here still works; the cooking time does not.
- The timing is the one thing to changeTwenty to thirty minutes will reduce modern asparagus to grey threads. Thin spears need 2-4 minutes in boiling water, thick ones 5-7, until a knife slides into the base with slight resistance. The long boil suits much thicker stalks than are usually sold now.
- Scraping"Scrape" means peeling the lower third of each stalk with a swivel peeler, which is still worth doing on spears thicker than a pencil. Snapping off the woody base works too, but then the bundles will not be of even length as the recipe wants.
- Boiling fast without the lidSound advice and worth keeping; leaving the pot uncovered is traditionally said to help the green stay green. Use a wide pan with well-salted water rather than a tall asparagus steamer unless you have one.
- SippetsSimply slices of toast, crusts removed, laid in the serving dish to soak up the cooking liquid and butter. Cut them to fit the dish and toast them dry, not buttered, or they will go slack.
- Melted butter with lemon"The juice of a lemon to every pint" is roughly one lemon to two cups of melted butter, which is a large quantity by modern serving standards. Scale to about 4 tablespoons butter and a teaspoon of juice per person.
- Oiled butterNineteenth-century usage for butter melted gently until it oils and separates, served as plain melted fat rather than as a thickened sauce.
- YieldA pound of asparagus serves three as a side, two if it is the course.
Asparagus on toast was standard service in English and Anglo-American dining rooms through the nineteenth century: the sippet is there to catch the buttery liquor that would otherwise pool in the dish. The insistence on tying even bundles and untying them on the toast so the spears lie one way is service etiquette as much as cookery. The nod to Paris and "other continental cities" for oiled butter reflects the position Oscar occupied, interpreting European practice for an American hotel clientele that wanted to be told what was done abroad.