No. 705

Puree of Asparagus

Puree d'Asperges

Break off the tender ends of sufficient green asparagus to obtain a pound of tops. Blanch these in boiling, salted water in a copper basin, then drain them well and fry in a saucepan with four ounces of butter. Moisten with a pint of broth (No. 189), and let them cook until this is entirely reduced, then pound the asparagus in a mortar, adding a pint of very thick bechamel sauce (No. 409), season with salt and sugar, reduce the whole, press through a fine sieve, and return the puree to the saucepan, to heat without boiling; stir in at the last moment two ounces of fine butter.

← No. 704 Puree of Artichoke Bottoms and Jerusalem Art Garnishings No. 706 Puree of Beans Bretonne →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French vegetable purée from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, intended as a garnish or bed for meats rather than a soup. The critical point is the finish: once the butter goes in, the purée must not boil.

Skip the copper basinUnlined copper was used to hold the green of vegetables, an effect of copper ions binding to chlorophyll. It also leaches copper into the food; use stainless steel and preserve colour by blanching in generously salted water and draining promptly.
Quantities in modern termsA pound of asparagus tops will take at least 2 lb of untrimmed spears, and more if you snap them off high. Four ounces of butter is one stick, the finishing two ounces is half a stick, and a pint is 2 cups in both the broth and the béchamel.
The brothNo. 189 is one of Ranhofer's cross-referenced basic broths, not repeated here. Use a mild, unsalted stock so the reduction does not turn salty as it cooks down.
"Fry" means sweatThe asparagus goes into the butter over moderate heat to soften without colouring. Browning at this stage muddies both the flavour and the colour of the finished purée.
Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but the sieving is not optional if you want the texture Ranhofer intends. Push the purée through a fine sieve or drum sieve with a stiff rubber scraper to catch the fibrous threads.
The sugarA pinch, not a spoonful. It is there to lift the vegetable's own sweetness against the salt, in the same way a pinch goes into a tomato sauce.
Heating without boilingBéchamel plus a large amount of butter will separate or turn oily if it comes to a boil after the final enrichment. Warm it gently, off the direct heat if need be, and serve at once.
YieldRoughly 2 to 3 cups depending on how far you reduce it, enough as a garnish for several plates. It does not reheat well; the butter breaks and the green dulls to olive.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer worked as chef at Delmonico's in New York across two spells totalling more than thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working system set down in print, which is why this entry sits in a numbered run of purées under "Garnishings" and cross-references a stock and a sauce by number rather than repeating them. Purées of this kind were a fixture of nineteenth-century French service: vegetables cooked down, pounded, bound with béchamel and sieved, then used as a bed beneath a cutlet or piped into artichoke bottoms and tartlet cases. The heavy butter finish and the compulsory sieving are the marks of a brigade kitchen with staff to spare, and the instruction to blanch in a copper basin reflects a professional habit of the period, when unlined copper was valued for keeping green vegetables green, a practice later abandoned once copper's toxicity in food was better understood.