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Fresh Asparagus Tips in Cream
Cut all tender parts of a large bunch of fresh green asparagus in one-inch-long pieces. Plunge in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt, a teaspoon sugar, boil twenty minutes and drain on a sieve. Mix in a saucepan a half ounce butter with one ounce flour, heat for a half minute, then pour in one gill hot milk, one gill cream, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar, one saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix well with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then add the tips with half ounce good butter; mix well, let boil for five minutes, pour in a vegetable dish and serve.
A plain béchamel with asparagus folded through it. The only thing standing between this and a good dish is the cooking time, which belongs to an era that liked its vegetables surrendered.
- Cut the boiling time hardTwenty minutes will reduce inch-long tips to fibre and grey-green mush, and they then get five minutes more in the sauce. Three to five minutes in the boiling salted water is enough for pencil-thick spears, less for thin ones; drain and, if you are not saucing immediately, spread them out or shock in cold water to stop the cooking.
- A gillHalf a cup, so the sauce is half a cup hot milk and half a cup cream — one cup of liquid in total.
- Butter and flour by weightHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; one ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup. That is a fairly stiff roux for a cup of liquid, giving a sauce thick enough to coat rather than pool. Loosen with a little more milk if it tightens too far.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. For nutmeg that is generous by current taste — an eighth, grated fresh, reads as warmth rather than as nutmeg.
- Sugar in the cooking waterUsually read as a corrective rather than a sweetener: asparagus loses sweetness and can taste sharper as it ages. With genuinely fresh spears you can leave it out of both the water and the sauce.
- Heat the roux brieflyHalf a minute is only enough to take the rawest edge off the flour, and it stops short of letting it colour, which keeps the sauce white. Add the hot milk and cream off the heat or in a slow stream, whisking, to avoid lumps.
- The final five minutesMeant to marry the sauce and the vegetable, but at a bare simmer and no longer — a rolling boil with the tips in will break them up. Two or three minutes to heat through is truer to the intent.
- YieldBunches vary; a large one might run a pound to a pound and a half untrimmed, which after trimming to the tender parts should serve about four as a side dish.
Asparagus in a cream sauce is one of the standard treatments of the classical French repertoire, and the pattern here — blanch in salted water, bind in a white sauce enriched with cream and finished with a knob of raw butter — is straightforward kitchen French, nutmeg and all. Asparagus was a luxury of short season, forced under glass for the wealthy and otherwise available only in late spring, which is why many books of the era also carry recipes for the canned article. The instruction to use only the tender parts reflects the expense; trimmings were commonly put to use in soup.