Asparagus Soup
Cut the tops from about thirty heads of asparagus, about half an inch long, and boil the rest; cut off all the tender portions and rub through a sieve, adding a little salt; warm three pints soup stock, add a small lump of butter and a tea-spoon of flour previously cooked by heating the butter and slowly stirring in the flour; then add the asparagus pulp. Boil slowly a quarter of an hour, stirring in two or three table-spoons cream; color the soup with a tea-spoon of prepared spinach, made by pounding the spinach well, adding a few drops of water, squeezing the juice through a cloth and putting it over a good fire. As soon as it looks curdy, take it off, and strain the liquor through a sieve. What remains on the sieve is to be used for coloring the soup. Just before serving soup, add the asparagus tops which have been separately boiled.
A classic asparagus velouté in miniature, with an unusual side errand: the recipe has you manufacture your own green food colouring from spinach. Almost everything here works as written, but two ingredient quantities need translating and one step is optional by modern standards.
- How much asparagusThirty heads is roughly two supermarket bunches, about 2 lb untrimmed. Snap or cut away the woody bases before boiling the stalks; only the tender part is meant to go through the sieve.
- Three pints of stockSix cups in US measure. If your book is following British pints it would be 7 1/2 cups, but for a soup of this size six is the sensible reading. Chicken or a light veal stock suits it better than beef.
- The roux is deliberately tinyA teaspoon of flour in six cups of liquid thickens almost nothing. The body of this soup comes from the sieved asparagus pulp; the butter and flour are there for gloss and to keep the purée from separating. Resist the urge to scale it up.
- SievingA blender or food processor before the sieve saves considerable arm work, but do not skip the sieve — asparagus stalks carry long fibres that a blender will shred rather than remove.
- "Prepared spinach"This is the old professional colouring known as spinach green: pounded spinach juice heated until the green protein curdles out, then caught in a sieve. The curds are the pigment. It is purely cosmetic, and a handful of spinach leaves blanched and puréed into the soup gives much the same colour with less ceremony.
- The cream and the quarter hourBoil the purée slowly for the fifteen minutes as directed, but stir the cream in at the end and take the pot off the heat once it is through. Cream held at a hard boil can separate.
- The tipsBoil the half-inch tips separately in salted water for 2 to 3 minutes, until just tender and still bright, then add them at the table as instructed. Cooking them with the stalks turns them olive-drab and soft.
- Yield and seasoningSix cups of stock plus purée serves six as a first course. The recipe salts only the pulp; taste and correct at the end, and a scrape of nutmeg or white pepper is period-appropriate.
Asparagus soup belongs to the nineteenth-century family of vegetable purées and velouté-style soups that American cookbooks took more or less directly from French practice, and the giveaway here is the spinach colouring — vert d'épinards, a standard professional preparation made by pressing the juice from pounded spinach, heating it until the green coagulates, and reserving the curd as a pigment. That a household compilation like The Dixie Cook Book expected a cook to make it at home says a good deal about the period's appetite for restaurant technique in domestic kitchens, and about how much asparagus fades when boiled long enough to sieve. Asparagus itself was a spring luxury, and improved shipping later made it more widely available out of season; a soup that stretched two bunches into six servings of stock was a way of serving an expensive vegetable to a table full of people, with the whole, bright tips scattered on top as evidence of what had gone into it.