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Asparagus
Tough lower ends should be cut off. Cook in deep sauce-pan standing upright. The steam will cook the tender tips while the hard stalks will be cooked in the boiling water. Or break into inch pieces, cooking tip parts first and adding the tender tips the last 15 minutes. Serve on toast with drawn butter or with white or Hollandaise sauce or bake the cooked asparagus with Golden sauce. 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1½ cups milk
A method note rather than a fixed recipe: the asparagus is boiled and steamed at once in a deep pan, then dressed with one of several sauces. The ingredient list at the end is the white-sauce base, given without instructions.
- The timing is far too longFifteen minutes for tips, plus whatever the stalks had before that, produces olive-grey mush. Trimmed spears standing upright in a couple of inches of boiling water need 5-8 minutes depending on thickness; tips alone need 2-3. Pull them while they still have resistance at the base.
- A likely misprint"Cooking tip parts first" almost certainly means the stalk pieces first, with the tips added at the end — which is what the upright method achieves in one pan. Read it that way.
- The upright panAny tall pot works, or a stockpot with the spears bundled in kitchen twine and stood on their cut ends. The point is to keep the tips out of the water and in the steam; tall narrow pots, and sometimes coffee pots, were pressed into service for it.
- TrimmingRather than cutting a fixed length off, bend each spear until it snaps; it tends to break near where the stalk turns woody, though the point is only approximate. Thick spears benefit from peeling the lower two inches.
- Drawn butterNot simply melted butter in this period but a thin butter sauce: butter cooked with a little flour and thinned with water or the asparagus liquor. Melted butter with lemon does the same job now.
- The sauce base3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 1½ cups milk is a medium white sauce. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two before adding warm milk gradually, and simmer until it no longer tastes of raw starch.
- Golden sauceIn books of this era this generally means the white sauce enriched with one or two beaten egg yolks stirred in off the heat. It should not boil after the yolks go in.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no yield; as a rough modern guide this much sauce will dress around 2 lb of asparagus. If baking, spread the cooked spears in a shallow dish, coat with sauce and brown in a hot oven until bubbling — the recipe itself specifies no temperature or time.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders, in large numbers and almost never sold. Its tone explains the compression here: the company's interest was in nutrition and thrift, so vegetable entries are terse method notes meant to teach a technique rather than a single dish, and the sauce quantities are dropped in at the end as a formula to be memorized. The recipe asks only for a deep sauce-pan, and the reasoning behind cooking asparagus upright, that stalk and tip cook at different rates, is sound and still the basis of every good asparagus method. What has changed is the clock. Vegetables in early twentieth-century American cooking were commonly boiled to full softness, and the shift toward brief cooking and bright color belongs largely to the second half of the century.