Asparagus
Cut off the tips and use the stalks for soup. Take one small roll for each person, scoop out the crumbs, brush each inside and out with butter, and brown slightly in a hot oven. Simmer the tips in boiling salted water until tender, about fourteen minutes; add them to a rich thick cream sauce and fill the hot rolls with this mixture.
A creamed-asparagus filling served in hollowed dinner rolls — a tidy way to plate a vegetable course. Two things in the original need adjusting: the cooking time and the unspecified sauce.
- Fourteen minutes is too longThin asparagus tips are done in three to four minutes in boiling salted water, thicker ones in five or six. Fourteen minutes gives you olive-drab mush; drain the moment a tip bends under its own weight and shock in cold water if you are not saucing immediately.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperature; a hot oven of the period is roughly 400-450F. The rolls are only being crisped and coloured, so a few minutes is enough — watch them, since buttered crumb browns fast.
- "Rich thick cream sauce"The book assumes you know it: a béchamel at roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup of milk or cream, which is thicker than a pouring sauce and will sit in the roll without soaking through. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg.
- The rollsUse firm, close-crumbed dinner rolls or small brioche, not soft supermarket buns, which collapse. Cut a lid, hollow out leaving a shell about half an inch thick, and butter the inside as well as the outside — the butter waterproofs the crumb.
- Don't waste the stalksThe instruction to keep them for soup is the practical heart of the recipe. Simmer the trimmed stalks with onion and stock, purée and sieve out the fibres; the woody ends can go in and be strained off.
- Yield and timingOne roll per person as a first course or a side to roast game or poultry. Fill at the last minute — the sauce softens the shell within a few minutes of sitting.
Asparagus in cream inside a hollowed roll belongs to a family of late-Victorian and Edwardian service dishes — croustades, timbales, bouchées, patty shells — in which a creamed filling is given a crisp edible container so it can be set directly on a plate without a serving dish. The bread croustade served as the household counterpart to the pastry vol-au-vent, and cookbooks of the period repeat it with sweetbreads, mushrooms, oysters and chicken as readily as asparagus. The instruction to send the stalks to the soup pot is equally characteristic — asparagus was a costly, short-season crop, and thrift with the trimmings was assumed rather than praised.