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Fresh Asparagus, Hollandaise Sauce
Neatly scrape, cut off the ends of the stalks and wash a large bunch of fresh asparagus, tie them in two bunches and plunge in two quarts boiling water with a tablespoon of salt and boil for twenty minutes. Carefully remove without breaking, dress on a hot dish with a napkin over it and serve with a hot Hollandaise sauce separately.
A straightforward boiled asparagus, of the kind served as its own course in hotel dining rooms. Only the timing genuinely needs revising.
- The twenty minutesTwenty minutes in boiling water will reduce modern asparagus to olive-drab threads. Thick spears need 4 to 6 minutes, pencil-thin ones 2 to 3; pull them when a knife slides into the base with slight resistance. Older cookbooks often assumed thicker, coarser stalks than the tender asparagus usually sold today, though this recipe gives no indication of size.
- Scraping"Neatly scrape" means shaving the fibrous skin from the lower half of each stalk with a peeler, a step still worth doing on spears thicker than a finger. Thin spears need only the woody ends snapped or cut off.
- Tying the bunchesBundling with kitchen twine keeps the spears from knocking about and lets you lift them all at once without snapping the tips. Tie loosely in two places, near the base and just below the heads.
- The saltA tablespoon to two quarts is about right, roughly 1 percent salinity. Use a wide pan rather than a deep one so the bundles lie flat and cook evenly.
- The napkinThe folded linen napkin under or over the asparagus is period service, not decoration: it absorbs the water that continues to drain from the stalks so the dish does not go soupy. A clean folded tea towel does the same job.
- Sauce served separatelyHollandaise is passed in a warm sauceboat, not poured over. Hold it barely warm, around 130F; much above roughly 160F the yolks curdle and the emulsion breaks, and a broken sauce is awkward to rescue.
- YieldA "large bunch" is not a fixed weight; reckon on a pound or so, enough for about four as a first course.
Boiled asparagus with hollandaise is one of the fixed points of the classical French repertoire, and its appearance in a printed collection reflects how thoroughly hotel and restaurant cooking of the period had absorbed French service conventions. The napkin service is the giveaway: asparagus was treated as a course in its own right, eaten with the fingers or with specialized asparagus tongs, and the linen caught both drips and butter. Hollandaise is often said to derive from Dutch-influenced butter-and-egg sauces, though this origin story is folk tradition rather than established fact; the name attached firmly to the modern emulsion in nineteenth-century French kitchens, and it was Escoffier who later placed it among the mother sauces. Asparagus was still strongly seasonal when this was written, a few weeks in spring, which is part of why it warranted such ceremony.