No. 2748

Hop Stalks or Points Fried and with Viennese Sauce

Pointes ou Tiges de Houblon Frites et a la Sauce Viennaise

Select the white parts of some young hops; these should be picked from the 15th of May to the 15th of June; blanch them in boiling water with salt, drain and lay them on a dish to season with salt and lemon juice, roll in rice flour, dip them in frying batter (No. 137), not too thick, plunge into hot fat, and when done drain, salt and serve.

Viennese.—After the hops have been cooked in salted water, drain well and place them in a vegetable dish, covering over with Viennese sauce (No. 558).

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For the Modern Kitchen

Hop shoots are a genuine spring vegetable, still eaten in Belgium and northern France, but they are seasonal to the point of scarcity and the recipe assumes two cross-references you may not have to hand.

What to buyThe "white parts of young hops" are the blanched underground shoots of the hop bine, cut before they green up, not the flowers used in brewing. Sold in spring as jets de houblon or hop asparagus; wild hop shoots from an untreated bine work equally well. The May 15-June 15 window is whatever Ranhofer took as normal in his own practice, and it will shift by climate.
Blanch brieflyThe shoots are thin and cook in about two to three minutes in well-salted boiling water. Anything longer and they collapse into string; they should keep the snap of a thin asparagus tip.
Dry them hardThis is the hinge of the fried version. Blanched shoots hold water in every crevice, and wet shoots will steam inside the batter and shed it in the fat. Drain, spread on a towel, and let them cool and dry fully before seasoning.
Rice flour firstThe rice flour coat is not decorative. It gives the wet batter something to grip and keeps the coating light and crisp; cornstarch is a fair stand-in. Shake off the surplus.
The batter and the fatRanhofer's No. 137 frying batter is, broadly, a flour-and-liquid batter with egg, and the recipe itself says it should not be too thick. The book says only "hot fat"; by modern practice fry at 350-375F in small batches so the temperature holds, and the shoots need only a minute or two to colour.
Viennese sauceNo. 558 in the same book is the cross-reference the recipe depends on, and by the conventions of the name it is likely a bound white sauce enriched with egg and butter. If you are working from this page alone, a light hollandaise or a chicken velouty finished with yolk, butter and lemon serves the same purpose: something warm, glossy and acidic against the faint bitterness of the hops.
Yield and servingNo quantity is given. Hop shoots are sold in small bundles and cook down considerably; reckon on a generous handful per person as a first course, and serve the fried version immediately, salted straight out of the fat.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of the restaurant's repertoire, and the vegetable chapters are where its French ambitions show most plainly. Hop shoots are a Low Countries and northern French delicacy above all: jets de houblon are still a celebrated spring item in Belgian Flanders, where the brief cutting season and the labour of gathering the pale underground tips are often said to make them among the most expensive vegetables sold anywhere, though that reputation appears to be largely a modern, marketed one. Their appearance in a New York book is a claim to seriousness rather than a note on what was easy to buy. The name of the sauce may point the same way: "Viennese" garnishes and sauces are often taken to have been a nineteenth-century French kitchen convention denoting a rich, egg-bound and buttery finish rather than anything actually Austrian, and the pairing of a delicate bitter vegetable with a soft acid sauce is the standard classical treatment for asparagus, cardoons and salsify alike.