No. 3540

Asparagus

Asperges

Cook one pound of asparagus tops in plenty of unsalted water; drain and lay them in a tinned basin with ten egg-yolks and twelve ounces of sugar; mix thoroughly, incorporating a pint of boiling milk; cook this preparation without allowing to boil, and put aside to cool, then add a pint of cream; color a third part to a pale green; strain through a sieve, and freeze the parts separately. With this ice fill some asparagus-shaped molds, the stalks or third part to be of the green ice, and the remainder white. Freeze the molds for half an hour, unmold, tie in bunches of three with a pink ribbon, and dress on napkins. Serve separately a sauce made of vanilla ice cream (No. 3458), whipped cream (No. 50) and maraschino. Asparagus can also be imitated by filling the molds with pistachio (No. 3454) and vanilla ice cream (No. 3458), and serving the same as the above.

← No. 3539 Alexandria Ices & Ice Creams No. 3541 Bananas in Surprise →

For the Modern Kitchen

A trompe-l'oeil dessert: a rich custard ice flavored with asparagus, frozen in hinged pewter molds and presented as tied bunches of spears. The cooking is straightforward French custard work; the difficulty is entirely in the molding.

Cook the custard to a number"Cook this preparation without allowing to boil" means take it to 175-180F on a thermometer, stirring constantly, until it coats the back of a spoon. Ten yolks to a pint of milk sets fast, and past about 185F it will scramble.
Tinned basinA tin-lined bowl, most often lined copper, tinning being the standard interior for period cooking vessels. Any heavy stainless or enameled saucepan does the same job now; a double boiler gives more margin for error.
The asparagusOne pound of tops means the tender tips only, which will take rather more than a pound of whole spears. The recipe says only to lay them in with the yolks and sugar, but since the mixture is strained later, puréeing them into the base is the practical reading.
StrainingThe sieve step is not optional. Asparagus fiber will not soften in a custard, and anything that survives the sieve will read as string in the finished ice.
ColoringThe original calls for a pale green coloring, which in 1894 might have been spinach green (blanched spinach pounded and pressed, its juice heated to set the color) rather than a bottled dye. Spinach green adds color without flavor and is still the cleanest way to do it.
FreezingFreeze both batches in a churn to a firm soft-serve stage, pack the green into the mold's stalk end and the white above it, then harden. Half an hour in a modern freezer is not enough for a filled mold — allow two to three hours at 0F, and dip the mold briefly in cool water to unmold.
MoldsVegetable- and fruit-shaped ice molds were common confectioners' stock in this period, and surviving examples are now collectors' items. Without them the recipe still works as a plain asparagus ice cream, served in coupes with the maraschino sauce.
YieldRoughly two quarts of ice cream in total; the number of molded bunches depends on the size of the molds.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of what a great American restaurant could do when money and labor were not the constraint. Vegetable ices were not a novelty in his world — European confectioners had made savory-flavored ices, celery among them, well before the nineteenth century, when the line between savory and sweet in frozen work was less firmly drawn — but the point here is the illusion rather than the flavor. This belongs to the tradition of the surprise dish, in which the dessert course impersonates something from earlier in the meal; the entry immediately following in the same section is bananas in surprise. The alternative given at the end, filling the same molds with ordinary pistachio and vanilla, tells you plainly which part of the exercise Ranhofer thought mattered: the bunch, the ribbon, and the napkin.