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Cold Asparagus, Vinaigrette
Carefully scrape and clip off the ends of two branches fine, fresh asparagus; thoroughly wash, then tie in three bunches and plunge in three quarts boiling water with a tablespoon salt. Cover the pan and let boil for twenty-five minutes. Remove, thoroughly drain and let get cold. Dress on a dish with a folded napkin. Untie and serve with a gill of salad dressing in a saucepan separately.
A straightforward cold vegetable course, but the boiling time belongs to an era of thick, field-grown asparagus and is far beyond anything modern spears will survive.
- Cut the cooking time hardTwenty-five minutes turns today's asparagus to grey mush. Thin spears need 2-3 minutes in boiling water, medium 4-5, very thick peeled spears 6-8. Pull them while there is still resistance at the base of the stalk.
- Chill it properly"Let get cold" on its own means the spears keep cooking in their own heat and go olive-drab. Drain and drop straight into ice water, then drain again and pat dry, which sets the green and keeps the dressing from being watered down.
- A gillHalf a cup, which is a generous amount of vinaigrette for this quantity served cold. Given the title, "salad dressing" here most likely means a plain oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette seasoned with salt and pepper.
- "In a saucepan"Odd phrasing: a French saucière is a sauceboat rather than a cooking pot, which may lie behind it. Either way, serve the dressing in a small pitcher or boat alongside, not poured over.
- "Two branches"Since the asparagus is then tied into three bunches, this must mean two bunches, roughly 2 lb in total, not two individual spears.
- ScrapingPeeling with a swivel peeler from just under the tip down to the base gives the same result as scraping and matters most with thick spears, whose skin stays fibrous. Snap or trim the woody ends rather than measuring.
- TyingTying in bunches with kitchen string is still worth doing: it lets you lift the whole lot out at once at the exact moment, and keeps the tips from breaking off in the water.
- SaltA tablespoon in three quarts is on the light side by current practice. Salt the water assertively, since this is the only seasoning the spears themselves receive.
- YieldTwo bunches serve four to six as a first course. The folded napkin on the dish is there to absorb the water that keeps seeping out of cold asparagus, and it still does that job.
Cold asparagus with vinaigrette is a fixture of French service, where it usually appears as a spring entree eaten with the fingers, one spear at a time, dipped in the sauce. Its presence in The International Cook Book reflects that book's habit of translating the professional restaurant repertoire of the period into American home kitchens, sometimes very literally. The folded napkin was standard hotel presentation for boiled asparagus and artichokes, and the long boil reflects genuinely different produce. Asparagus of that era is generally thought to have run thicker, sometimes blanched white by earthing up the crowns, and tougher than the slender green spears that dominate supermarkets now.