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Beef Croquettes with Asparagus Tips
Prepare six beef croquettes same. Open and thoroughly drain a pint of asparagus tips. Place them in a frying pan with half ounce butter; season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon white pepper and half teaspoon sugar and toss them well while cooking for five minutes.
Arrange the croquettes on a hot dish, one overlapping another. Dress the asparagus around the croquettes, and serve with a gill of hot demi-glace around the asparagus.
This is an assembly-and-plating recipe rather than a standalone one: it assumes you have already made croquettes from the preceding entry and have demi-glace on hand. A few of its measures and assumptions need translating.
- "Prepare six beef croquettes same"The instruction points back to the croquette recipe immediately before it in the book. Any thick beef croquette mixture, chilled firm, breaded and fried, will do.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so you need about 4 fl oz of demi-glace. A saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon.
- A pint of asparagus tips"Open and thoroughly drain" indicates canned asparagus; a modern can of roughly 15 oz is the nearest equivalent. If you use fresh or frozen tips, cook them through first, since the pan step here is only reheating and glazing.
- Five minutes is too longCanned tips are already fully cooked and collapse into threads with sustained heat. Two minutes of gentle tossing in the butter is enough to warm them and take on the seasoning.
- Drain them properlyCanned asparagus carries a lot of brine, and any of it left in the pan will thin the butter into a grey liquid and run onto the plate against the demi-glace. Drain, then blot on a towel.
- The half teaspoon of sugarLikely less a sweetener than a corrective for the flat, tinny edge of canned asparagus. Taste before adding it if you have substituted fresh spears.
- Demi-glaceA reduction of brown stock and espagnole sauce, simmered down until glossy. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate is a fair substitute; a thin gravy is not, as the point is a small quantity of intensely flavoured sauce.
- PlatingSauce the plate around the asparagus, not over the croquettes. The breadcrumb crust is the only crisp element on the dish and softens within a minute of being covered.
Recipes like this one belong to the era when a canned vegetable was a mark of modernity rather than a compromise. Commercial canning of asparagus was well established in the United States by the turn of the twentieth century, and tips packed in tins were available year-round while fresh spears had a short spring season. The dish itself is straightforward hotel-kitchen practice: croquettes were often made from cooked meat left from a joint, and dressing them with a green vegetable and a spoonful of demi-glace turned yesterday's beef into a course that could be sent out under a French name. The demi-glace is the tell. It presumes a kitchen with brown stock always reducing on the back of the range.