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Cooking Asparagus
The simplest manner of cooking asparagus is the best, if you wish to enjoy the full flavor. Thoroughly wash in cold water each stalk and the tough end broken off. Bind the stalks in small bunches with a strip of muslin; place in a kettle and pour over them just boiling water to merely cover; simmer gently until tender, but not soft. It must not be boiled too long and is really better a little underdone. Take it from the water as soon as tender. The time required to properly cook asparagus depends on its freshness and age; fresh and tender stalks require not more than fourteen or twenty-one minutes. If older or slightly wilted, twenty-one to twenty-eight will be necessary. Do not throw away the water in which the asparagus has been cooked or the tough ends of the stalks. Cook the latter in a little water; add this water to that remaining after cooking the tender stalks, and use it for making a cream of asparagus soup, adding a few of the tips and tender stalks cut into small pieces.
The method is sound and the advice about saving the cooking water is worth following. The timings are the one thing to ignore.
- The timings, first of allFourteen to twenty-one minutes will give you grey, collapsing asparagus. Thin spears need 2-4 minutes in simmering water, medium 4-6, thick 6-8. Test with a knife tip at the base of a stalk rather than watching the clock.
- Why the original says so longAsparagus of the period often reached the kitchen days after cutting, and the stalks were frequently mature and fibrous. The book's own note that older or wilted stalks need still longer points the same way. Asparagus cooked within a few days of cutting does not need that treatment.
- KettleHere it means a cooking pot on the range rather than a tea kettle; the recipe does not specify whether it is covered. A wide saute pan or skillet is easier, since the spears lie flat in a single layer and cook evenly.
- Binding the bunchesThe muslin strip keeps the tips from breaking up and lets you lift the whole bunch out at once. Kitchen twine does the same job. Skip it if you are cooking spears flat in a pan, where nothing needs holding together.
- Salt and the waterThe recipe omits salt entirely. Salt the water well; asparagus takes seasoning poorly after the fact. Barely covering the spears, as directed, keeps the cooking liquid concentrated enough to be worth saving.
- Stopping the cooking"Take it from the water as soon as tender" is the hinge of the whole recipe. Carryover heat keeps working in a hot bunch, so drain immediately and spread the spears out; if you are serving them cold or later, drop them into ice water.
- The trimmings and liquidSimmering the woody ends and adding that liquor to the cooking water gives you a genuine asparagus stock. Strain it, since the ends stay fibrous no matter how long they cook, and use it within a couple of days or freeze it.
- YieldA pound of asparagus, trimmed, serves three to four as a side dish.
Asparagus was a market-garden luxury with a short season, and nineteenth-century American cookbooks tend to treat it either as an early sign of spring or as something to be drowned in white sauce. The insistence here on the simplest treatment, and on stopping short of soft, reflects a shift in late-Victorian cookery writing toward shorter cooking of green vegetables. The instruction to save both the cooking water and the tough ends is thrift of the ordinary domestic kind: a spring vegetable priced by the bunch was not something a careful household threw half of away.