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Scrambled Eggs with Fresh Asparagus Tips
Cut the tender parts of a bunch of fresh, ripe asparagus into half-inch pieces, thoroughly wash in cold water and drain well. Place in a small saucepan, with half teaspoon salt, a teaspoon sugar and one quart water, boil twenty-five minutes and drain. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add the asparagus tips and cook for two minutes, tossing meanwhile. Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper; sharply beat with fork for one minute, drop eggs into pan and cook for six minutes, gently stirring meanwhile, pour in a deep dish and serve.
A plain French-style scramble padded out with asparagus, from a period when both the vegetable and the eggs were cooked considerably harder than we would cook them now. Two timings need adjusting; everything else stands.
- Boil the asparagus far lessTwenty-five minutes will reduce half-inch tips to grey mush. Cut tips of that size need three to five minutes in salted boiling water, then draining well so the scramble does not go watery.
- The sugar in the waterSugar in the cooking water turns up in a number of period asparagus recipes; it is usually explained as taking the edge off older, woodier stems. With modern thin-stemmed bunches it is optional; the salt is not.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 1/4 cup for eight eggs, about half a tablespoon each. That is a modest amount of liquid and will still give a soft curd if the heat is kept low.
- Two saltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is half a teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive by current tastes; a quarter teaspoon is plenty unless you want the pepper forward.
- Six minutes means low heatEight eggs cannot take six minutes over anything but a gentle flame without setting into a hard mass. Keep the pan low, stir steadily, and pull them off while they still look slightly underdone — carryover heat finishes them in the serving dish.
- ButterOne tablespoon for eight eggs is thin for a modern nonstick-free pan. Two is safer, and the extra butter is what gives this kind of scramble its texture.
- YieldEight eggs serves four generously as a main dish, six at a breakfast table with other things on it.
Scrambled eggs with asparagus tips belong to the standard repertoire of hotel and restaurant cookery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when asparagus was a genuinely seasonal luxury and its tips were used to dress up simple egg dishes, omelettes and vol-au-vents. The instruction to boil the tips separately before folding them into the eggs is the classic method: it seasons the vegetable and fixes its colour before it meets the fat. The long boiling time here reflects both the thicker, tougher asparagus of the period and what is often said to have been a pre-war preference for vegetables cooked until entirely soft American kkitchens well into the twentieth century and is the single thing most worth ignoring in this recipe.