Asparagus Soup
Scrape two bunches of asparagus, cut off the ends of the stalks, wash and tie up. Put in a large saucepan, cover with boiling water, add one teaspoonful of salt and boil for half an hour. Cut off the tips, lay them aside and return the stalks to the saucepan to cook until very tender-about twenty minutes longer. Drain, chop and rub through a sieve. Add to the pulp one quart of hot veal stock. Rub one tablespoonful of butter and two of flour to a smooth paste and stir into the soup. When dissolved and the soup is thick and smooth, season to taste with salt and pepper and bring to the boiling point for a moment. Add one-half of a cupful of hot cream, beat well with an egg beater and serve.
A straightforward purée soup from the era when veal stock was the default neutral base. The main adjustment is time: fifty minutes of boiling will leave you with khaki-coloured asparagus and very little flavour.
- Cooking timeModern asparagus is younger and thinner than the thick, sandy field spears this book assumes. Ten to fifteen minutes of simmering will bring stalks to purée-tenderness; the tips need three or four minutes at most and should be lifted out early as directed.
- Two bunchesA bunch at the greengrocer runs about a pound, so figure on 2 lb of asparagus. With a quart of stock and half a cup of cream this yields roughly six cups, or four to six servings.
- Scraping and tyingPeeling was necessary for the tough, thick spears of the period. With pencil-thin asparagus, skip it and simply snap off the woody ends. Tying in a bundle is only useful if you want the tips to stay intact for garnish.
- Save the cooking waterThe recipe drains the asparagus and discards the liquid, which is where a good deal of the flavour has gone. Reserving it and using it to thin the purée in place of some of the stock costs nothing.
- Veal stockRarely sold now. A light unsalted chicken stock is the closest everyday substitute; a vegetable stock also works, though the soup loses the faint body that gelatinous veal bones give it.
- The rouxStirring a raw butter-and-flour paste into hot soup works (the recipe uses a heavier hand with the flour than the usual equal-parts beurre manié), but cook it at a bare simmer for several minutes afterwards or the soup will taste of flour. Two tablespoons of flour to a quart gives a moderate thickening on top of the body the purée already supplies; use one if you want it lighter.
- The sieveA blender or immersion blender does the pulping in seconds, but still pass it through a sieve afterwards. Asparagus stalks are full of long fibres that no blender fully breaks down.
- After the creamOnce the cream goes in, keep the soup below a simmer. The instruction to boil comes before the cream for a reason, and the final beating is only to smooth it, not to reheat it.
Cream of asparagus belongs to the family of sieved vegetable purée soups that were a staple of American and British cookbooks between the 1880s and the First World War, when a fine sieve and a strong arm stood in for the food mill and the blender. The reliance on veal stock is the period marker: veal bones gave a pale, gelatinous, almost flavourless liquid that carried body without colouring or overpowering a delicate vegetable, and it was a standard base in the well-equipped kitchens of the period. Asparagus itself was a spring luxury with a short local season, expensive enough that recipes like this one, which extracts every usable scrap of pulp from the stalks and sets the tips aside separately, reflect genuine thrift rather than technique for its own sake. The finish of hot cream beaten in at the last moment is standard for the style, and the egg beater is a small sign of the date: mechanical rotary beaters were by then familiar enough in American households to be named in passing.