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Fresh Asparagus Tips
Cut the tender parts of a large bunch fresh green, sound, asparagus, wash in cold water, drain, and place in a saucepan with a quart water, a teaspoon salt, a teaspoon sugar, and boil for twenty minutes. Remove and thoroughly drain on a sieve. Heat half an ounce butter in a frying pan, add the tips. Season with a saltspoon salt, two saltspoons sugar and two saltspoons pepper. Toss gently, and cook for five minutes, tossing them once in a while. Dress on a vegetable dish and serve. (If no fresh asparagus is at hand, use canned asparagus, but boil for five minutes instead of twenty, and prepare the same way.)
A plain buttered asparagus from an era that boiled green vegetables into submission. The measurements convert easily; the timing is the part to ignore.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the pan seasoning is 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon sugar and 1/2 teaspoon pepper — that last figure is heavy by current taste, and a few grinds is closer to what most cooks want.
- Half an ounce butterOne tablespoon. For a large bunch of asparagus it is a thin coating; two tablespoons gives the tips a proper gloss without turning the dish greasy.
- The twenty-minute boilThe instruction that has aged worst. Twenty minutes leaves asparagus grey-green and collapsing, and the additional five minutes in butter compounds it. Thin spears need two to four minutes in boiling water, thick ones five to six — until a knife tip meets slight resistance at the base.
- Draining and shockingThe recipe drains on a sieve, which is right, but the tips keep cooking on their own heat. Plunging them into ice water for a minute and then drying them holds the colour, and they reheat in the butter in under two minutes.
- Salt and sugar in the waterA teaspoon of salt to a quart is on the light side for vegetable water; a tablespoon seasons the spears from within. The sugar is a period habit, possibly intended to flatter older, woodier asparagus, and can be left out with spring stalks.
- "Cut the tender parts"Rather than measuring, bend each spear near the base and let it snap where the fibre gives way. Thick spears also benefit from peeling the lower two inches, which the recipe assumes away by discarding them.
- Canned asparagusAlready fully cooked and packed in brine. Five more minutes of boiling is unnecessary; drain, rinse, and warm through in the butter. Frozen spears are the better modern substitute and go straight into the pan from frozen.
- YieldA large bunch is roughly a pound to a pound and a half of untrimmed spears, which serves four as a side dish once the tough ends are gone.
Asparagus held an odd position in turn-of-the-century American cookery: expensive, brief in season, and often served as a course in its own right rather than as an afterthought beside meat, which may be why it carries a note on the canned substitute for the months when fresh was unavailable. Canned asparagus was widely available by the 1900s, and some cookbooks of the period append a line telling the reader how to adapt. The long boil reflects the standard of the day rather than carelessness; vegetables were expected to be soft, and the brisk finish in butter with salt, sugar and pepper is a restrained dressing in the French manner. The pinch of sugar in the cooking water is a survival of an older belief that it preserved sweetness and colour, more traditional than demonstrated.