Home › The World's Kitchen › Fresh Asparagus Polonaise
Fresh Asparagus Polonaise
Trim off ends, carefully scrape and thoroughly wash two bunches sound, fresh asparagus, tie in three bunches, then plunge in three quarts boiling water with tablespoon salt and boil for twenty-five minutes. Lift up, drain on a sieve and dress on a dish. Place one ounce butter in a frying pan with three tablespoons bread crumbs, toss on fire until a light brown, pour butter over asparagus and serve.
A one-paragraph recipe with one badly outdated instruction. Fix the boiling time and the rest holds up.
- Twenty-five minutes is the problemModern asparagus goes limp and grey-green in a fraction of that time. Thick spears need 4-6 minutes in boiling salted water, thin ones 2-3; pull them while the tips still have resistance. Older recipes routinely gave long boils of this kind, which suits thicker, coarser-butted spears better than the slender asparagus sold today.
- ScrapingOlder recipes like this one call for scraping the stalk with a knife. Today, snap or trim the woody base and peel only the bottom two inches of thick spears; thin spears need nothing.
- Tying in bunchesWorth doing — it lets you lift the whole lot out at once and stops the tips breaking up. Kitchen twine round the middle, or a rubber band removed before serving.
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. That is a modest amount for three tablespoons of crumbs; a little more butter gives you enough to spoon over the spears rather than just a dry crumb topping.
- Bread crumbsUse dry crumbs from stale bread, not the sandy commercial kind. Toss them over medium heat and stop the moment they turn light brown — they go from pale to burnt in seconds once the butter is hot.
- "Dress on a dish"Simply arrange the drained spears in a neat single layer on a warmed platter, tips all one way. Drain them well or the buttered crumbs will sit in a puddle.
- What a full polonaise usually includesThe classic polonaise garnish also carries sieved or finely chopped hard-boiled egg and parsley scattered over with the crumbs. This recipe leaves them out; adding them is entirely in keeping.
- YieldTwo bunches, perhaps around 2 lb depending on how the bunches are made up, serves about four as a first course or side.
"Polonaise" — Polish-style — is the French kitchen's name for the treatment rather than a Polish recipe as such: butter browned with bread crumbs, usually with sieved or chopped hard-boiled egg and parsley, spooned over a boiled vegetable. It is generally traced to the Polish habit of finishing cauliflower and other boiled vegetables with browned crumbs and butter, a garnish that passed into the French professional repertoire and from there into English-language cookbooks like this one. Asparagus was a luxury crop when this was written, sold in tied bunches, and the fact that the recipe specifies buying two bunches and boiling them whole reflects how it reached the kitchen — as a bundle from the market, not loose spears.