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Asparagus Salad
After having scraped and washed asparagus, boil soft in salt water, drain off water, add pepper, salt and strong cider vinegar,, and then cool. Before serving, arrange asparagus so that heads will all lie in center of dish; mix the vinegar in which it was put after removing from the fire with good olive oil or melted butter, and pour over the asparagus. -Mrs. Lewis Brown.
A plain nineteenth-century asparagus vinaigrette, served cool rather than cold. The instructions are loose in two places worth pinning down: how long "boil soft" should be, and how much oil to vinegar.
- Don't boil it softThis is the hinge. Asparagus cooked until genuinely soft turns grey-green and stringy; 2-4 minutes in salted boiling water for medium spears is enough, until a knife slips into the base with slight resistance. Drain and spread out to stop the cooking.
- ScrapingPeriod cookbooks routinely direct that the lower stalk be scraped or peeled with a knife, as here. Modern thin spears need only the woody ends snapped off; peel only if the stalks are thicker than a thumb.
- Dressing ratioThe recipe reuses the seasoned vinegar as the acid, but gives no proportion. Three parts oil to one part vinegar is the standard reading; the vinegar here has been diluted by the asparagus water, so taste before adding more.
- Strong cider vinegarPeriod cider vinegar varied in strength. Commercial vinegar today is standardised at about 5 percent acidity; what "strong" meant here is not recoverable, so taste and adjust.
- Oil or butterThe recipe treats melted butter and olive oil as interchangeable. Butter will set solid on chilled asparagus, so if you use it, serve the dish barely cool rather than refrigerator-cold.
- Marinating timeThe asparagus sits in the seasoned vinegar while it cools. Half an hour is plenty; several hours will bleach the colour and soften the spears further.
- YieldTwo pounds of asparagus dresses six as a salad course. Arrange the spears in bundles with the tips meeting at the centre, as directed, and pour the dressing over just before it goes to the table.
Asparagus salads of this kind belong to a long tradition of "cold boiled vegetable with oil and vinegar" dishes that filled the salad chapters of American cookbooks before leafy salads became routine; the same treatment appears for green beans, beets and cauliflower. This version offers olive oil or melted butter as equal alternatives, a reminder that olive oil was an imported luxury of uncertain quality in much of the nineteenth-century United States. The instruction to arrange the tips toward the centre of the dish reflects the era's interest in presentation at table: asparagus was a spring delicacy with a short season, expensive enough to be worth composing rather than heaping.