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Cold Fresh Asparagus, Mayonnaise
Scrape and clip off ends of two bunches fresh, sound asparagus, thoroughly wash in cold water, tie in three bunches, plunge in three quarts boiling water with a tablespoon salt. Cover pan and gently boil twenty-five minutes. Take up and replunge in cold water until thoroughly cold. Drain well, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve with a mayonnaise sauce separately.
A straightforward cold asparagus course from the era when vegetables were boiled far longer than we would tolerate. Almost everything here still works; the timing does not.
- The timing is the whole problemTwenty-five minutes will reduce fresh asparagus to grey threads. Modern spears need 3-5 minutes in boiling water depending on thickness, until a knife slips into the base with slight resistance.
- Why the old time was so longAsparagus of the period was often thicker and field-grown, with tougher, more fibrous skin — hence the scraping. Thin supermarket spears need no peeling at all; only very thick ones benefit from a peeler run down the lower third.
- Two bunchesA modern bunch runs roughly 1 to 1.5 lb, so two bunches serve six to eight as a first course.
- Salt the water properlyOne tablespoon in three quarts is on the light side. Salt more assertively — the asparagus is served cold and will taste flat otherwise.
- Tie the bundlesKitchen twine around each bundle keeps the spears aligned and lets you lift them all out at once, which matters when the window between done and mushy is short.
- The cold plunge is not optionalIce water, not merely cold, and only until the spears are cold through. Left to sit, they waterlog; drain them upright on a towel.
- The folded napkinA linen napkin on the platter absorbs residual water so the mayonnaise is not thinned on the plate. A double layer of clean tea towel does the same job.
- Mayonnaise served separatelySauce alongside, never over — the spears are meant to be picked up and dipped. If you make the mayonnaise by hand with raw egg, use pasteurized eggs for a dish that will not be cooked.
Cold asparagus with a cold sauce was a fixture of the French-influenced service that governed hotel and better home dining, and it appears in a book like this one as a course, a place in the menu, more than a regional dish. Asparagus itself was a strictly seasonal luxury, cut in spring from beds that were said to take some years to establish, which is why nineteenth-century books spend so much care on it and why an entry exists for the cold version as well as the hot. The instruction to serve on a folded napkin is generally traced to formal French service, where the linen caught the water that inevitably drained from the spears; the same convention shows up in period directions for boiled fish. Eating asparagus with the fingers, dipping it into the sauce, was explicitly permitted by etiquette writers of the day.