Old-fashioned asparagus

rosemary
Oct 2
7 min read

"No good will come from matching asparagus with anything that might overshadow its gentle nature. Any accompaniment needs to know its place." Nigel Slater

I suspect this is a somewhat similar ramble to yesterday's - but today the ingredients are different - asparagus, vinaigrette and probably eggs. Plus the usual variations I suppose.

It's actually my next first recipe post which I have been ignoring because I thought it was just too boring however much it coincides with the opening of the asparagus season here in Victoria in October - not as in England:

"a moment in late April, somewhere between the end of the plum blossom and at the height of the apple ..." Nigel Slater

Wrong month, right season, although I would have thought we were past the height of the apple - maybe apples have a different season in England. The plum blossom has certainly ended however, and the plum trees are busily creating their new plums which, in our house anyway, will eventually be turned into jam - just before Christmas.

As you can see from the picture of my somewhat grubby looking volume, we are still in the Beverley Sutherland Smith section of my bookshelves, and we shall be for a little while. Possibly three more to go from here.

And since I was writing about book covers the day before yesterday, a few words on this one. The title is pretty clear I guess, in that we know what this is all about - and that subtitle - "An epicurean book with exciting uses for the delights and good foods of each season" - sort of clarifies it further but with a slightly strange selection of words that don't seem to quite belong to each other. I suppose Beverley's name is clear, but it doesn't exactly leap out at you, and although I rather like the art work, I'm not really sure what it has to do with seasons. It would be more appropiate for a book about condiments surely?. And one small thing that really dates it - curly parsley. I know you can still get it, but does anyone use it these days? It doesn't taste as good and it's much harder to chop because it sort of bounces out of the way of your knife.

Beverley - or her publishers - have chosen to begin with Spring - well I suppose Spring signifies new beginnings and the choice of Asparagus as the first ingredient, is actually not an alphabetical choice - it's more of a representative of first courses - followed by other vegetables - beans, peas and some others, new potatoes. I find this last one a bit curious for an Australian writer, because honestly we really don't have what I call new potatoes here. I suppose they are new and small but they are not Jersey Royals and their similar cousins. Then there's spring lamb and beef, followed by cherries, gooseberries - again never to be found here, although back then if you were observant you might some some very, very briefly - and finally herbs and spices - which is sort of interesting.

So asparagus -" the first indication in the shops that spring is beginning" - as she says and which still holds. Real Australian asparagus that is and:

"Asparagus is one of the world’s truly luxurious foods, which fortunately is within reach of a lot more people than other luxury foods, so when you eat it, you want it to be as perfect of an experience as possible." David Lebovitz

with which Nigel Slater concurs:

"Asparagus is still a huge treat. No matter how much its price comes down, its luxury status will never diminish for me."

Which is sort of true. Somehow or other I have this idea in my head of asparagus being a luxury food but I have no idea why because they are certainly within everyone's reach - the bargain of the moment here anyway, so I'm always looking for new ways to use it. Even though everyone says the best way is to just steam or griddle it and serve with butter:

"Because who can be bothered looking up new recipes for asparagus when you can just chuck some spears in the oven drizzled with olive oil, or in a pool of garlic butter sizzling in a skillet, then sprinkle over some salt and pepper, top with a poached egg, bam. Need variation? Lemon zest/juice, or parmesan, or pine nuts or all three. Or soy sauce and butter, or miso butter. Too easy." Milliemirepoix

'Soy sauce, miso, pine nuts' - time has moved on.

Yesterday we had a quickie NIgel recipe of fish, dill, butter and asparagus - served with some oven baked potato wedges. Quite nice, but not a massive success. I think the fish - ling - was a bit tough if that's a word that can be applied to fish. The sauce was nice though.

The picture at the top of the page is for Beverley's first recipe Asparagus vinaigrette à la crème, which now that I look at the recipe is really a bit of a hodge podge of several different common dressings for asparagus - Hollandaise, vinaigrette or some kind of mayonnaise. I will come to the eggs. The recipe is not online - very, very few of Beverley's are, which is really, really sad, because I still cook several of hers and most of them are really good. Basically for her recipe you make a sauce by whipping together cream, Dijon mustard, tarragon vinegar, mayonnaise, salt and pepper, spread it decoratively across your asparagus and then top with lines of hard boiled eggs - whites chopped, yolks sieved, and chopped parsley. Done. An old-fashioned restaurant kind of appetiser.

The photograph which I found later in the book is what finally persuaded me to begin on this. It's one of those books with very few photographs and those that there are are never near the recipe which is an old-fashioned kind of thing in itself. And somehow that presentation looked old-fashioned - but why because, as you shall see asparagus is often still presented in similar fashion.

I began by focussing on the vinaigrette - I hadn't really looked at the recipe then. If I had I would have seen that it's not really a vinaigrette. I found three examples, all of which stressed the Frenchness of this approach - The perfect vinaigrette à la Jean-Georges - Bonberi Bulletin, which included a brief video of an American lady demonstrating this recipe created by an apparently top NY chef called Jean-Georges Vongerichten. It looked great, was extremely simple, and included her - and the chef's - insistence that you peel the lower part of the asparagus stems, which is a bit of a controversy. Having now seen various people saying one or the other, and never having peeled them myself, I think I might try next time I cook asparagus, just to decide for myself. Then there was Asparagus vinaigrette - From France with Love also fairly basic although this was the first bit of egg that crept in, and another chef recipe - French asparagus with champagne citrus vinaigrette - Le Chefs Wife which is not simple because the asparagus are in a sort of salad with fennel, spring onions, almonds, orange and lemon, and the dressing as you can tell from the title includes champagne, as well as more spring onions and white balsamic vinegar.

By now I had cottoned on to the eggs, and pretty soon realised that this is actually a classic restaurant kind of dish called Asparagus mimosa - mimosa being the word used to describe a topping of hard boiled eggs. - usually with asparagus. So I looked for asparagus mimosa which turned up heaps, varying in the degree of how they stuck to something reasonably traditional.

Jamie had two variations. In the first Asparagus, eggs and French dressing he sort of simplifies the idea by not chopping the eggs, and also keeping them slightly under hard-boiled, and adds tarragon to the dressing. The second is Tender asparagus which has a vinaigrette dressing with the addition of blitzed spring onions - hence the green colour - plus some crispy bacon and croutons to contrast with the hard-boiled egg.

The others are more varied: Asparagus mimosa - Olive and Mango - whose author pushes her egg through a sieve and adds capers and fried prosciutto to the mix David Lebovitz also adds capers, to his Asparagus mimosa but is fairly minimalist with his vinaigrette and the eggs and parsley, which are just chopped and relatively sparse; Asparagus mimosa with caper vinaigrette from Big Delicious Life is also fairly standard although she uses champagne vinegar and the herbs are dill and chives; our own Adam Liaw on the Good Food website adds the chopped eggs to the vinaigrette and pours the whole lot over his Asparagus with chopped egg vinaigrette; and Ottolenghi, maybe surprisingly, has the most classic version of all - no vinaigrette just olive oil, eggs, and capers - the picture is from his book Plenty - the recipe from Milliemirepoix. And as, you can see they all look pretty similar. I would say, guess for yourself how much egg you want and how fine you want it to be.

Somewhere along the line, or on the net, whilst browsing the mimosas, I found that some of the cooks I found were now calling their sauce - sauce gribiche - which it turns out is a mixture of all of the saucy components we have met so far:

"Sauce gribiche is a cold egg sauce in French cuisine, made by emulsifying hard-boiled egg yolks and mustard with a neutral oil like canola or grapeseed. The sauce is finished with chopped pickled cucumbers, capers, parsley, chervil and tarragon. It also includes hard-boiled egg whites cut in a julienne." Wikipedia

Once again we see how somebody's good idea of a what goes with what, morphs into somebody else's elaboration and then on to somebody else's - almost ad infinitum - and delicious. both here and in the UK are the representatives here - Griddled asparagus with gribiche sauce on toast - delicious. (uk); Asparagus with white anchovy gribiche - delicious.

So where are we today with asparagus? Well here are two examples, and of course there are many more, but Beverley may well not have thought of either miso or avocado back then. Then incidentally was 1978. So I give you Nigel and Yotam - Steamed asparagus, miso mayonnaise - Nigel Slater and Grilled asparagus with avocado and horseradish - Ottolenghi