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Cream of Asparagus
Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a medium-sized saucepan, then add a pint of drained canned asparagus tips, keeping the liquor, and gently cook on the fire for ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile; pour in the liquor of the asparagus and two quarts hot water; add one sliced white onion, two cloves, one saltspoon thyme, one bay leaf and two branches parsley. If any clean raw chicken bones are at hand, add them. Season with two teaspoons salt, half teaspoon sugar, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Cover the pan and let gently simmer for forty minutes. Dilute in a bowl five tablespoons rice flour with one egg yolk and one pint of milk, and add to the broth. Mix well with a wooden spoon while cooking for five minutes. Remove; strain the cream through a fine sieve, then through cheesecloth into a hot soup tureen, and serve with a plate of fried bread croutons.
A classic hotel-style cream soup: aromatics simmered into a thin broth, then bound with rice flour and egg yolk and passed through cloth. The straining is the whole point of the dish, not an optional finish.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the thyme and nutmeg are 1/4 teaspoon each, and the two saltspoons of cayenne come to 1/2 teaspoon — assertive but not unreasonable across three quarts of liquid. Start with half that if you are unsure of your cayenne.
- YieldTwo quarts of water plus the asparagus liquor and a pint of milk gives roughly 3 quarts before reduction and straining, so eight to ten servings. Halve everything for a household batch.
- Canned asparagus tipsA pint drained is about 2 cans of modern spears. Fresh asparagus works: about 1 1/2 lb, tips reserved, stalks simmered in the broth, and use 2 cups of light stock in place of the tinned liquor.
- Rice flourRice flour thickens without gluten and gives the smooth, slightly translucent body these old cream soups aim for. Cornstarch is the closest substitute at about two-thirds the volume; wheat flour will need to cook longer or the soup tastes pasty.
- The egg yolkIt goes into a cold pint of milk with the flour, so it is tempered by dilution before it meets the hot broth. Add the mixture in a stream while stirring, and keep the soup at a bare simmer for the five minutes — a hard boil after the yolk goes in will curdle it.
- Chicken bonesThe optional raw bones are there for body. A backbone and a couple of wing tips are plenty; strain them out with everything else. If you use them, they should simmer the full forty minutes.
- Straining twiceSieve first, then cheesecloth. The second pass is what removes the thyme grit, onion fibre and asparagus threads and gives the velvet texture the name promises. Wet and wring the cloth first so it does not drink the soup.
- ServingThe recipe deliberately strains the asparagus tips out. If you want them visible, hold back a dozen tips before the ten-minute butter cooking, blanch them separately and drop them into the tureen. Croutons should be fried in butter and added at the table so they stay crisp.
Cream soups of this kind — a flavoured broth, a starch-and-yolk liaison, and a compulsory pass through cheesecloth — were the backbone of restaurant and hotel menus in the decades on either side of 1900, and *The International Cook Book* belongs squarely to that professional tradition, cataloguing dish after dish in the terse manner of a chef writing for other cooks. The reliance on canned asparagus is telling: commercially canned vegetables were widely available in American cities by the turn of the century, and asparagus in particular was expensive and briefly seasonal fresh, so the tin made a luxury soup possible in January. The rice-flour liaison rather than a butter-and-flour roux is a French method generally associated with *potages à la crème* that were meant to be pale and glossy rather than floury; the egg yolk is there for richness and colour as much as for thickening. The cayenne and nutmeg together are a period signature, the sort of seasoning often used for anything bland and white.