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Asparagus
Cut off the green ends, and chop up the remainder of the stalks; boil until tender, and season with salt and pepper; have ready some toasted bread in a deep dish ; mix together equal parts of flour and butter to a cream ; add to this slowly enough of the asparagus water or clear hot water to make a sauce; boil this up once; put the asparagus on the toast and pour over all the sauce.
A plain butter-and-flour sauce over toast, typical of the way asparagus was served before anyone thought to eat the spears whole and barely cooked. A few things in the wording need reading twice.
- The confusing first lineAs written it says to cut off the green ends and chop the rest, which reverses modern practice. The sense is almost certainly to reserve the tips and cut up the stalks below them; snap or trim off the woody base and discard it, then cut the tender stalk into short lengths.
- "Boil until tender"Nineteenth-century cooks boiled asparagus far longer than we do, commonly to a soft, drab olive colour. Cut stalks are tender in 4 to 6 minutes in salted water, tips in 2 to 3. Cook the stalks first and add the tips near the end.
- Save the cooking waterThe recipe calls for the asparagus water or, failing that, clear hot water. The asparagus liquor is the better of the two, so keep about a cup of it hot and use it as the liquid rather than pouring it away.
- Equal parts flour and butterThis is butter worked cold with an equal amount of flour to a paste, what French cookery calls beurre manie. Two tablespoons of each thickens roughly a cup of liquid to a pouring sauce.
- "Boil this up once"One good boil is the minimum needed to cook out the raw flour taste and set the thickening. Whisk the liquid in gradually off the heat, then bring it to a boil while stirring, and hold it there for a minute.
- The toastUse a firm white bread, toasted dry and hard rather than soft. It is there to absorb the sauce without collapsing, so a fresh sandwich loaf will turn to paste.
- YieldA pound of asparagus with a cup of sauce serves two as a lunch dish or four as a side. The original gives no quantities at all, which was normal for a book written for cooks who already knew what a bunch of asparagus looked like.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper go into the asparagus here, not the sauce. Taste the finished sauce as well; flour-thickened sauces made with vegetable water need more salt than expected.
Asparagus on toast was one of the standard American ways of serving the vegetable through the nineteenth century, when it arrived in short, expensive spring bunches and was served with bread and a butter sauce. The technique here is the plainest form of what French cookery called a white sauce, made without milk or cream and thickened instead with the vegetable's own cooking liquor, an economy that also keeps the flavour in the dish. The Home Cook Book (first published in Chicago in 1874, with later editions through the 1870s), to which this page is generally attributed, was compiled from recipes many of which are credited to local women by name, and sold to raise money for the Chicago Home for the Friendless; its asparagus entry reflects the era's general conviction that green vegetables should be boiled soft. The habit of serving whole spears barely cooked, tips intact, belongs to a later taste.