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Asparagus Salad
Boil the asparagus in water until tender; cut off the hard ends, and set the rest away. When cool, cut in inch long pieces, and put it in your salad dish. Pour over a mayonaise dressing, and garnish with a few capers.
A three-line recipe that depends entirely on how the asparagus is cooked. Everything else is assembly.
- Boil briefly, not "until tender"Nineteenth-century recipes commonly gave asparagus a quarter of an hour or more; medium spears need 3-4 minutes in well-salted boiling water, thick ones 5. Pull them while the stalks still have resistance, since they continue to soften as they cool.
- Chill fast"Set the rest away" presumably meant somewhere cool. Drain and drop the spears into ice water to stop the cooking and hold the colour, then dry them well or the dressing will slide off.
- Trim before or afterThe original cooks first and cuts the woody ends off after. Snapping or peeling the tough lower inch before boiling is easier and wastes less, and gives you evenly cooked pieces.
- The mayonnaiseA period "mayonaise dressing" was made by hand from raw yolk, oil and vinegar, often with mustard and sometimes loosened with cream. Any good mayonnaise works; thin it with a spoonful of lemon juice or cream so it coats rather than clumps.
- CapersRinse brined capers and pat them dry, or the brine will streak the dressing. Salt-packed capers need a longer soak.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. A bunch of asparagus, roughly 1 lb, with about 1/3 cup of dressing serves four as a first course or side.
- ServingDress it shortly before it goes to the table. Asparagus weeps once cut and salted, and mayonnaise left sitting on it separates into a watery layer.
Cold cooked vegetables under mayonnaise were a familiar form of respectable American salad-making in the 1870s, when The Home Cook Book was assembled in Chicago from contributions by local women and sold in aid of the Home for the Friendless. Asparagus was a short-season luxury in that era, and a recipe like this one, which does nothing to the vegetable but boil, cool and dress it, is a sign of a household that could afford to let an expensive ingredient speak for itself. The spelling "mayonaise" is one variant among several in use at the time, when the sauce could be spelled several ways in English-language cookbooks; it was made fresh by hand, and the phrase "a mayonaise dressing" would presumably have sent the reader to another page of the same book rather than to a jar.