Home › The World's Kitchen › Asparagus Tips with Brown Butter
Asparagus Tips with Brown Butter
Open a pint can asparagus tips, remove water and plunge in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt for five minutes, thoroughly drain on a sieve and dress in a vegetable dish. Place one ounce good butter in a frying pan, toss on fire until a light brown colour, then add a tablespoon vinegar and half teaspoon chopped parsley, lightly mix, pour butter over tips and serve.
A canned-asparagus dish from the era when tinned vegetables were a mark of a well-stocked larder. The whole point is the browned butter, and it turns from nut-brown to burnt in seconds.
- The hinge: watch the butterOne ounce is 2 tablespoons. Melt it over medium heat and swirl until the milk solids at the bottom go hazelnut brown and it smells toasted — roughly 2 to 3 minutes. Pull it off the heat the moment it colours, because the residual heat of the pan will carry it further.
- Adding the vinegarA tablespoon of cold vinegar hitting hot butter will spit. Take the pan off the burner first, then add it; the mixture becomes a thin, sharp sauce rather than a broken one. Cider or white wine vinegar suits better than harsh distilled white.
- Five minutes is too longCanned asparagus is already fully cooked and soft. Boiling it a further five minutes reduces the tips to threads. Warming them through in the salted water for 30 to 60 seconds, or simply draining and heating them gently, is enough.
- If you use fresh asparagusA pint can yields somewhere around 9 to 12 ounces drained, so roughly a pound of fresh spears once trimmed. Boil trimmed tips in well-salted water for 2 to 4 minutes depending on thickness, then drain thoroughly — wet asparagus will dilute the butter.
- Drain properlyThe instruction to 'thoroughly drain on a sieve' matters. Any water clinging to the tips will pool in the serving dish and thin the sauce to nothing.
- YieldServes two as a side dish, three at a stretch. The quantities scale directly; keep the butter at 2 tablespoons per pint of asparagus or the dish turns greasy.
Browned butter with vinegar and parsley belongs to the French beurre noir family of sauces (a darker, sharper relation of beurre noisette), long part of the professional repertoire and most often met with skate, brains or eggs. Its appearance here over canned asparagus tips says something about the table of the period: commercially canned vegetables were cheap, reliable and available year-round, and a number of cookbooks of the era treated them not as a compromise but as a convenience worth dressing up with a classic sauce. A recipe calling for 'a pint can asparagus tips' by name assumes the reader knows exactly what tin to reach for.