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Puree of Asparagus
Pick out the tender parts of the asparagus, wash thoroughly, and heat in boiling water with some salt to make them green. When beginning to get tender, drain and place them in cold water. When cold, drain on a clean towel, and when dry, put in a saucepan previously prepared with a small piece of fresh butter, some sprigs of green parsley, and a few green onions; fry them as quickly as possible, to preserve the green color, adding a lump of sugar, a little salt, and a small quantity of fine flour, and moisten with a good broth. Cool quickly and rub through a tammy sieve, adding a little spinach green to color it.
A classic French-style purée soup base, written in the shorthand of a professional brigade: no quantities, no yield, and several steps that assume a nineteenth-century hotel kitchen. The whole point of the method is colour, so read it as a green-vegetable technique first and a soup second.
- The hinge is the blanch and shockBoiling salted water brightens the green; the cold water arrests the cooking before the colour turns olive. Drain and dry the spears properly before they hit the butter, or the pan will steam rather than fry and the colour will dull.
- Quantities are absentFor a workable batch, figure 2 lb asparagus tips, 2 tablespoons butter, 4 spring onions, a small handful of parsley, 1 tablespoon flour and about 5 cups broth. That gives roughly six servings as a first course.
- "Green onions"Scallions or spring onions, used here for a mild allium background rather than the sweetness of a cooked leek. Use the white and pale green parts.
- "A lump of sugar"Roughly a teaspoon if you go by a modern cube, though period lumps were cut from a loaf and varied in size. It appears to be there to round the slight bitterness of asparagus rather than to sweeten the soup.
- "Fine flour" and the moisteningA light dusting to make a loose roux that binds the purée; a tablespoon is plenty for the batch above. Add the broth gradually and simmer only long enough to lose the raw flour taste.
- Tammy sieveA tammy was a fine woollen straining cloth through which purées were pressed or wrung; the name is related to the tamis, the drum-shaped frame sieve worked with a wooden pestle. A blender followed by a fine chinois or a good sieve does the same job faster and with less loss.
- "Spinach green"Homemade chlorophyll colouring: spinach leaves pounded, the juice pressed out and heated gently until the green solids coagulate, then strained off. It is a colour correction, not a flavour, and it is optional if the blanch went well.
- "Cool quickly"Presumably to stop residual heat from dulling or browning the purée; the recipe does not say how. If you plan to serve at once, sieve while hot and reheat gently without boiling; long simmering after puréeing will grey the soup.
Oscar Tschirky was not a cook by trade — he was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel — but the 1896 book that carries his name gathered the working repertoire of the hotel's kitchens, and this entry reads exactly like a line out of a French professional manual: no weights, no timings, just the sequence a trained saucier would need reminding of. Purées of green vegetables bound with a little flour and broth belong to the family of potages purées codified in nineteenth-century French practice and carried into American grand hotels along with their French-trained cooking. Asparagus was a short-season vegetable in the 1890s, which may be part of why the recipe uses the tender tips alone and takes such trouble to keep them looking green. The spinach colouring is a reminder of how much of that cooking was staged for the eye of the dining room.