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Fresh Asparagus, Cream Sauce
Carefully scrape and clip off the ends of two bunches of fine fresh asparagus, thoroughly wash, 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, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, and serve with a hot cream sauce separately.
A straightforward boiled asparagus, but the timing belongs to an era of thicker, coarser spears and a different idea of doneness. One change fixes the dish.
- The timing is the whole problemTwenty-five minutes in boiling water reduces modern asparagus to olive-drab mush. Thin spears need 2-3 minutes, medium 4-5, and thick peeled spears 6-7 — pull them when a knife tip slides into the base with slight resistance.
- "Scrape" means peelTake a vegetable peeler to the lower two or three inches of thick spears, from just below the tip down. Pencil-thin asparagus needs nothing but the woody end snapped or cut off.
- Tying in bundlesKitchen twine around each bunch lets you lift all the spears out at once before they overcook. Keep the bundles loose enough for water to circulate.
- Two bunchesRoughly 2 lb of asparagus as sold today, serving four to six as a separate course.
- The waterThree quarts with a tablespoon of salt is right — a generous volume keeps the boil from stalling when the cold spears go in. An immediate transfer to ice water sets the colour if you are not serving at once.
- Draining and the napkinDrain hard; residual water thins the sauce on the plate. The folded napkin is a service convention of the period, meant to absorb that water, and a warmed platter does the same job.
- The cream sauceThe book assumes you know it: a white roux of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour, whisked with 1 to 1 1/2 cups hot milk or cream, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg. Serve it in a sauceboat, as instructed, rather than over the spears.
Asparagus with a cream or white sauce is the classic restaurant treatment of the vegetable in the French tradition that The International Cook Book draws on — Alexander Filippini worked in the Delmonico's orbit in New York, and this is a Delmonico-style service: whole spears, a folded napkin, sauce passed separately so the diner is not presented with a plate of sauce. The long boiling reflects both thicker field-grown spears and what is often said to have been a nineteenth-century preference for cooking green vegetables until entirely soft; the modern taste for a firm spear came later. Asparagus was also strictly seasonal, which is why the recipe insists on "fine fresh" — canned asparagus was the year-round alternative and a distinctly lesser thing.