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Fried Asparagus
Blanch the asparagus a couple of minutes, and then drain it; dip each piece in batter and fry it in hot fat. When done, sprinkle with salt and serve hot. This is nice and easy to prepare.
A brief, loosely written recipe that assumes the cook already knows how to make a frying batter and judge hot fat. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Blanching means boiling water, then iceTwo minutes in salted boiling water is right for spears of pencil thickness; thick spears want three to four. Drop them into ice water immediately or the residual heat carries them past crisp, and dry them thoroughly or the batter will slide off.
- The batter is left to youThe book expects a standard fritter batter. One cup flour, one egg, about three-quarters cup milk or beer and a pinch of salt, whisked to the consistency of heavy cream, coats a pound of spears.
- Fat temperature"Hot fat" gives no number; for deep frying this is usually taken to be somewhere in the region of 365-375F, the point at which a cube of bread browns in about a minute. Much below that the batter absorbs grease; much above it the coating colours before the asparagus heats through.
- Fry in small batchesSix or eight spears at a time. Crowding drops the fat temperature sharply and produces a pale, soft crust. Two to three minutes gives a golden coating.
- Trim firstPeriod asparagus was often sold in thicker, sandier stalks than the trimmed supermarket bunch. Snap or peel the woody lower third before blanching; nothing in the batter will disguise a fibrous stem.
- Draining and saltSalt while the pieces are still glistening so it adheres. Drain on a rack rather than paper if you are holding any quantity, or the underside steams.
- YieldA pound of asparagus, the spear count varying widely with thickness, serves four as a side or two as a first course. Fried asparagus does not hold; serve it within a few minutes.
Asparagus was a market-garden crop with a short, sharply defined season, and cookbooks of the period give it a good deal of space precisely because it arrived all at once and had to be used. The Dixie Cook Book, a compilation of the type sold widely in the late nineteenth century, sits in a tradition where a great many vegetables could be dipped and fried: oyster plant, egg-plant and cauliflower get much the same treatment in books of the period. The brevity here is characteristic; batter proportions were treated as general knowledge, and the blanching step is what keeps the interior tender while the crust sets. The closing line, "This is nice and easy to prepare," reads as the voice of a contributed household recipe rather than a professional one, and books of this kind drew on such submissions.