Asparagus Peas
Wash asparagus, cut it in small pieces, simmer fifteen minutes, or until tender, in just enough water to cover it; thicken slightly with flour and butter stirred together; add a little sweet cream and season with salt and white pepper.
A plain creamed asparagus, cut small so the pieces resemble peas. The only real decision is how long to cook it.
- Fifteen minutes is too longAsparagus cut into half-inch lengths is tender in four to six minutes of simmering. The recipe's own escape clause is 'or until tender', and modern supermarket asparagus will collapse and go grey well before fifteen minutes. Cook until a piece yields to a knife tip and no further.
- Cut to the nameThe dish only works if the pieces are roughly pea-sized, about a quarter to half an inch. Snap off the woody bases first, and peel the lower stalk if it is thick.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the cultured sour cream a period kitchen also kept. Any heavy or whipping cream does the job; two to three tablespoons is enough for a pound of asparagus.
- Flour and butter stirred togetherThis is beurre manié, equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste, dropped into the simmering liquid in small pinches and stirred until it dissolves. Roughly a tablespoon of each thickens a cup of liquid to a light coating sauce. Let it bubble a minute or two so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Just enough water to coverThe cooking water becomes the sauce, so keep it scant and salt it from the start. If you finish with more liquid than you want, reduce it before adding the butter-flour paste rather than after.
- White pepperSpecified so no black flecks show in a pale sauce. It is a genuine flavour difference as well as a cosmetic one, and worth using here.
- YieldA pound of trimmed asparagus treated this way serves three or four as a side dish. It is best served at once; the sauce tightens and the asparagus dulls on standing.
Cutting a long vegetable into small rounds and dressing it in cream sauce so that it eats like something else was a common trick of nineteenth-century domestic cookery, and the names usually admit it: mock turtle, mock oysters from salsify, asparagus "peas." The technique itself, a butter-and-flour thickening finished with cream, is the standard white sauce of American cookbooks of the period, applied here with a very light hand so the asparagus is coated rather than buried. Compilations of this kind assumed the cook already knew how to thicken a sauce and needed only to be told the seasoning and the proportion.