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VEGETABLES (Bread crumbs asparagus)
bread - crumbs, asparagus and cheese, seasoning each layer.
Sprinkle a few buttered crackercrumbs on top. Pour the milk over all. Brown lightly in a hot oven.
The page as printed begins mid-sentence: this is the tail end of a scalloped asparagus, the sort of dish built in a buttered baking dish from cooked asparagus left from an earlier meal. The proportions are missing from the surviving text, so treat the following as a reconstruction of a standard scallop rather than a conversion of stated amounts.
- The missing quantitiesNo amounts survive on this page. A workable ratio for a 1 1/2-quart dish is about 2 cups cooked asparagus cut in inch lengths, 1 cup soft bread crumbs, 3/4 cup grated cheese and enough milk to come about two-thirds of the way up the layers, roughly 3/4 to 1 cup.
- "A hot oven"In period cookbooks 'hot oven' is usually glossed as roughly 400-450F, though authors differed. Since everything in the dish is already cooked, the oven is only setting the milk and colouring the top, so something around 425F for 20-25 minutes will do.
- Milk poured over, not a sauceThis is the older, simpler style of scallop, with no roux. The crumbs and cheese thicken the milk as it bakes. Use whole milk; skim milk will stay thin and weep.
- Asparagus that has already been cookedThe fragment does not say, but a layered scallop of this kind normally starts from already-cooked asparagus, which is soft to begin with, so the bake should be short. Fresh asparagus needs blanching in salted water for two or three minutes and thorough draining before it goes in, or the dish turns watery.
- Cracker crumbsNineteenth- and early twentieth-century cracker crumbs come from plain unsweetened soda or water crackers. Saltines are the closest modern equivalent; toss them with melted butter, about a tablespoon to half a cup of crumbs, so they brown rather than scorch.
- Seasoning each layerThe instruction is deliberate and worth following. Salt and pepper distributed layer by layer, with a scrape of nutmeg if you like, seasons the milk itself; salt on top only leaves the interior flat.
- The cheeseAn aged Cheddar or a dry grating cheese behaves best. Fresh mild cheese releases water and can turn stringy under a hot oven.
- YieldProportions as above serve four as a side dish, or two as a light supper with bread.
Scalloped vegetables were the standard use for the previous day's dinner in American household cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward: cooked food layered with crumbs, moistened with milk, and browned to give it a second appearance at the table. Asparagus was, by most accounts, a short-season luxury in northern markets, likely expensive enough that even a few cold stalks were worth keeping, which is why a dish like this earns its place. The pattern here is the ancestor of the casseroles that dominated mid-twentieth-century American cooking, but without the canned condensed soup that later replaced the plain milk and crumbs; the thickening comes from bread alone. Buttered cracker crumbs as a topping, rather than bread, was another common finish of the era, and appears across scallop recipes of the same decades.