Asparagus Salad
Cold boiled asparagus served with plain French dressing or mayonnaise, makes a most delicious and refreshing salad. If served with mayonnaise, use the tips only; have the asparagus very cold and do not mix the dressing with the salad; fill small, crisp lettuce leaves with the tips and place a spoonful of dressing on the top.
An assembly recipe rather than a cooked one, so almost everything depends on how the asparagus is boiled and how cold it gets before it reaches the plate.
- The hinge: undercook and shockThe book assumes you already have cold boiled asparagus, and period boiling instructions generally ran much longer than modern taste prefers. Boil salted water, give medium spears 2-4 minutes until barely tender, then drop them straight into ice water and drain well. Limp, waterlogged asparagus will not hold a spoonful of mayonnaise.
- Plain French dressingIn this period the term means a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing, not the sweet orange bottled kind. Three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to emulsify, is what is intended.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made at home from raw yolks and kept on ice for only a short time. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs and keep it refrigerated; a good commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice behaves much the same here.
- Tips onlyFor the mayonnaise version, use the top two inches or so. Save the trimmed stalks for soup rather than discarding them, and peel the lower stems if the spears are thick.
- Very cold means very coldChill the drained tips uncovered on a towel in the refrigerator for at least an hour. Surface moisture is the enemy: wet tips make the dressing slide off and pool in the lettuce.
- The lettuce cupsButter, Bibb or the inner heart leaves of iceberg give the small rigid cup the recipe wants. Loose leaf lettuces hold their shape less well.
- YieldReckon on 5-6 tips per person as a first course, so a standard bunch of asparagus fills four to six leaves.
Cold cooked vegetables dressed with oil and vinegar were a fixture of late Victorian and Edwardian menus, served as a light course between heavier dishes or alongside cold meat and game. Asparagus was still strongly seasonal and comparatively expensive at the turn of the century, harvested locally in spring and shipped in from the South as rail networks improved, so a recipe that treated the tips alone as the good part and the stalks as an afterthought carried a certain quiet luxury. The insistence on keeping the dressing separate reflects the era's preference for salads composed on the plate rather than tossed: dressing spooned over at the last moment kept the presentation crisp, which mattered in a period when a salad was judged as much on appearance as on flavor.