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Fresh Asparagus, Sauce Mousseline
Neatly scrape, cut off the ends of stalks and wash a large bunch fresh asparagus; tie in two bunches, plunge in two quarts boiling water with a tablespoon of salt and boil for twenty minutes. Carefully lift them up without breaking, dress on a hot dish with a napkin over it, and serve with a mousseline sauce separately.
A plain French service of asparagus whose only real fault is the clock. Everything else is a matter of trimming and presentation.
- Twenty minutes is far too longModern asparagus, cut young and shipped fast, is done in 3-5 minutes for pencil spears and 6-8 for thick ones — the tip should yield to a knife while the stalk still has spine. Twenty minutes reflects older, coarser, field-stored asparagus and will give you grey mush.
- ScrapingPeeling the lower third of thick spears with a vegetable peeler is still worth doing; it removes the fibrous skin and makes the stalks cook at the same rate as the tips. Thin spears need only the woody base snapped or cut off.
- Tying in bunchesThe point is to lift the whole lot out at once without snapping tips. Soft kitchen twine around the middle of each bundle works; leave a long tail hanging over the pot rim.
- The water and saltTwo quarts with a tablespoon of salt is roughly 1 percent salinity — season the water properly rather than the plate. Keep the boil brisk and uncovered so the green stays green.
- Sauce mousselineHollandaise lightened with a third to a half its volume of softly whipped cream, folded in at the last moment. It cannot be reheated or held long; make it while the water comes to the boil and keep it barely warm.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin on the hot platter absorbs the water that drains from the stalks so the sauce does not thin. A clean tea towel does the same job; the asparagus goes on top, tips all facing one way.
- YieldA large bunch is 1.5 to 2 lb, serving four as a first course. Serve the sauce in a warmed boat, not poured over.
Asparagus served alone and hot with a rich egg sauce was a familiar course on the late nineteenth-century table — it was frequently eaten with the fingers — which may be why the book gives it as a dish in its own right rather than a side vegetable. Sauce mousseline is hollandaise made airy with whipped cream; the name is usually explained as a reference to muslin, for its lightness, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. It belongs to the family of warm emulsions codified in French professional kitchens over the nineteenth century. The napkin under the spears is a working detail rather than a flourish: asparagus was a brief spring luxury, and draining it on linen kept the water from thinning an expensive sauce.