Fried Asparagus
Wash, trim the asparagus and parboil for three minutes; drain perfectly dry; then dip in egg and bread crumbs and fry in deep hot fat; sprinkle with salt and serve.
A short, workable recipe that assumes you know how to manage a kettle of fat. The only real difficulty is getting the spears dry enough for the coating to stick.
- Dry means dryThis is the hinge. Wet asparagus will shed its crumbs into the fat and spatter badly. After parboiling, shock the spears in cold water to stop the cooking, then lay them on a towel and blot them, turning once.
- Three minutes is for thin spearsPencil-thin asparagus is done in two to three minutes of parboiling; thick spears want four to five, or they will still be woody inside when the crust is brown. The frying adds almost no cooking time.
- Trimming"Trim" in books of this period would cover snapping off the fibrous butt and, on thick stalks, peeling the lower third with a knife. Peeling is still worth doing on anything thicker than a finger.
- Deep hot fatThe book names no fat and no temperature; lard or drippings would have been the likely household choices, and any neutral oil works now. Around 375F is the usual modern target. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash; two to three minutes gives a set, golden crust.
- The breadingEgg beaten with a spoonful of water or milk adheres better than egg alone, and dry fine crumbs beat fresh ones here. A light dusting of flour before the egg helps the coating grip the smooth skin of the spear.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities. As a guide, a pound of asparagus serves three or four as a side. Salt them the moment they leave the fat and serve at once; the crust softens within a few minutes. Lemon or a spoonful of hollandaise is a reasonable addition.
- Filed under GameIts placement may suggest it was meant as a garnish or accompaniment to roast birds rather than a course on its own, though the recipe itself gives no quantities either way.
Frying vegetables in egg and crumbs was standard late-Victorian practice for dressing up an ordinary garden crop for a company table, and asparagus in particular carried status: it was a short-season, labor-intensive crop whose beds took two or three years to come into bearing, so it signaled a well-kept kitchen garden or a willingness to pay market prices. American cook books of the 1890s and 1900s are full of these treatments, where a vegetable is parboiled to tenderness and then given a crust. Placing the recipe in a Game chapter may suggest that such books were organized around the menu rather than the ingredient: the reader looking up what to serve with roast quail or venison would find the vegetable there, ready to hand.