Damon Lee Fowler

“Asparagus,” wrote Lettice Bryan with her singular gift for understatement, “is a nice vegetable, and requires equally as much nicety in preparing it.”

Those words, from her landmark 1839 cookbook, The Kentucky Housewife, were penned in the days before our global garden, when winter’s table was dominated by cabbages and dried beans. One of the first edible sprouts to nose its way through the thawing earth after the long, cold winter, asparagus was the very essence of spring, available for only a few precious weeks of the season.

It would never have occurred to Mrs. Bryan to explain that, or to caution that asparagus is only “nice” when it has just been cut from a garden that is merely minutes away from the pot. There was no need to warn against spears that had been shipped across several continents or preach that only locally grown, seasonal asparagus was worth having.

She offered no advice, as most authors do today, for keeping it fresh until it’s used, but simply directed to “Gather them when fully grown but very tender, taking care to have them as near the same size as possible, that they may all get done at the same time” and went right into preparing them for the pot. She also provided just three perfect recipes, knowing that, in this case, discretion was the better part of valor.

Of the three, the loveliest and most sensitive—indeed one of the loveliest recipes in print, then or now, was—

Asparagus Soup.

Your asparagus must be young and tender; scrape and wash it neatly, and let it lie for a time in cold water; cut small some of the green tops, and put them also in cold water. Make a broth in the usual manner, of a few pounds of fresh veal or poultry, and a small piece of ham. Cut the stalks of the asparagus into pieces not more than an inch long, and boil them in the broth till tender, seasoning it with salt, pepper, and butter. Mash to a pulp enough of the asparagus to thicken the soup, and let the other remain in pieces. Stir in a little rich sweet cream; just let it come to a boil, and serve it up with toasted bread cut in dice, dispersing over it some sprigs of the green tops.

—Lettice Bryan, The Kentucky Housewife, 1839

Yes, today we can have “fresh” asparagus any time we want, but to have it just minutes from the garden, prepared by the hands of such a cook, is unfortunately rare even in its season.

In translating the recipe for Classical Southern Cooking, I did absolutely nothing but standardize the format, fill in directions that she took for granted, and set proportions for six servings. Everything else is as Mrs. Bryan intended it, right down to the nouvelle-cuisine-sounding raw tip garnish. All it requires is the freshest asparagus you can find.

Asparagus Soup

Serves 6
1 quart of Chicken Broth or Meat Broth made with veal bones (preferably homemade)
2 ounces country ham in one piece
1½ pounds young asparagus
1 tablespoon butter
Salt and whole black pepper in a peppermill
1 cup heavy cream at room temperature
1 cup Buttered Croutons (Recipe follows)

1. Bring the broth and ham to a boil in a large pot over medium heat. Meanwhile, peel the asparagus and drop it briefly into a basin of cold water. Let it soak for half an hour.

2. When the broth begins to boil, take up the asparagus, cut off the pointed tips, and cut the stems crosswise into one-inch long pieces. Roughly chop a dozen or so of the tips and set them aside in a bowl of cold water to cover.

3. Drop the remaining asparagus and the butter into the boiling broth. Let it return to a boil, then cover and lower the heat. Cook at a good simmer until the asparagus is tender, about 5—and no more than 10—minutes. Season it to taste with the salt and pepper.

4. With a slotted spoon, take out about a cup and a half of the greenest stems and tips and put them to the side in a covered bowl. Puree the remainder with the broth by forcing them through a sieve as Mrs. Bryan originally directed, or through a food mill. If you are not that energetic, a stick blender or food processor does this job nearly as well.

5. Return the soup to the pot and heat it through over medium heat. Stir in the reserved cooked asparagus and cream. Simmer until just heated through, stirring well, and turn off the heat.

6. Ladle the soup into individual heated soup plate and garnish with croutons and a sprinkling of the chopped raw tips.

Buttered Croutons

Cut ½-inch thick slices of good, day-old bread (preferably homemade) into small, bite-sized cubes. For every cup of cubed bread, allow 2 tablespoons of butter. Melt the butter over a medium heat in a heavy skillet that will comfortably hold all the bread. Add the bread cubes and quickly toss them to until they are coated. Sauté, tossing frequently, until they are golden brown and crisp.

Another way requiring less attention: preheat the oven to 300° F. Put the butter in a shallow baking pan that will hold all the bread cubes in one layer, and melt it in the oven. Add the bread and toss until it is well coated. Return the pan to the oven and bake, stirring from time to time, until they are lightly browned and crisp, about half an hour. Read More 

Among the best offerings of spring’s garden are the tender new roots that flourish in the slowly warming earth—the slim young carrots, bright beets and radishes, and sweet baby turnips. Rarely found in conventional markets, these delicacies are what make growing one’s own produce, or at the very least, finding the nearest Farmer’s Market, worthwhile.

Spring turnips in particular have a sweetness and delicacy that all too soon gives way to more robust flavors as the vegetables grow large and fat in summer’s lusty heat. To preserve their delicacy and bring out their best, I rarely look any further than this lovely two-hundred-year-old recipe from one of the South’s earliest (and still best) cookbooks:

Ragout of Turnips.

Peel as many small turnips as will fill a dish; put them into a stew pan with some butter and a little sugar, set them over a hot stove, shake them about, and turn them till they are a good brown; pour in half a pint of rich high seasoned gravy, stew the turnips till tender, and serve them with the gravy poured over them.”

— Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-wife, 1824.

Mrs. Randolph’s ragout is actually a classic French recipe for glazed turnips, one that she almost certainly learned from the French-trained cooks at Monticello. Jefferson’s great granddaughter, Martha Jefferson Trist Burke recalled having had the dish there, but unhappily her recollections were dim at best and her attempt at a recipe was, to put it bluntly, completely inept. Fortunately, her great-grandfather’s cookbook-writing cousin was paying better attention, because her rendition is lucid and absolutely right.

At Monticello, this would have been prepared (as Mrs. Randolph suggests) on the stew stove in the state-of-the-art French kitchen that Jefferson added to the south wing dependencies in 1809. Here, for modern cooks, is the same recipe with a little more illuminating detail.

Ragout of Turnips (Navets Glacés, or Glazed Turnips)
Serves 4

2 pounds very small young turnips of the same size
2-3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon sugar
1 cup rich, well seasoned veal or beef broth

Wash, peel, and trim the turnips to uniform rounds or ovals. Over medium heat, melt the butter in a sauté pan that will comfortably hold the turnips in one layer.

Add the turnips and raise the heat to medium high. Shake the pan until they are evenly coated with butter and then sprinkle the sugar over them. Sauté, shaking the pan to keep them rolling, until they are uniformly golden brown, about 4-to-5 minutes.

Add the broth, bring it to a boil, and then cover and reduce the heat to medium low. Simmer, frequently but gently shaking the pan, until the turnips are tender, about 10-15 minutes.

What Mrs. Randolph doesn’t tell us is that the “gravy” should be reduced to a glaze. If it isn’t, uncover and briefly raise the heat and cook until the liquid is almost evaporated, again gently but almost continuously shaking the pan. She also doesn’t mention what I usually do—swirl in a pat of fresh butter at the end, which is in keeping with classic technique.

Pour the turnips into a warm serving bowl and serve immediately. Read More 

When it came time to write the inaugural essay for this page, the thought that kept swimming to the surface was a theme from an essay I wrote last year: with thousands of “blogs” crowding cyberspace and literally millions of words floating around on the Internet, does the world really need yet another one?
Probably not; almost certainly not.
Most blogs (horrid word, that) are just silly, self-absorbed, attention-getting streams of consciousness that begin and end with the author’s ego. They have about as much substance as a cozy Hallmark moment.
Do I really want to add more of that to the world just to get attention?
But then it occurred to me: fool, you just started your own web site. Your name is has been dot-commed. The whole purpose is to get attention, and if you didn’t want to do that, you’d never have gone to this much trouble. What’s all this demure posturing about?
The ugly truth about writers is, we can’t stop ourselves. Just like painting, composing, sculpting—writing is a compulsion we can’t help. We’d do it even if no one read it, even if we were dogged by critics who said our words were no good.
There are countless novels tucked away in boxes under the author’s bed, novels that no one else has—or ever will—see.
But just because there’s a compulsion to put words on the page, it does not follow that those words have to be vacuous. If this turns into little more than a lot of navel-gazing streams of time-wasting, meaningless fluff, it’s no one’s fault but my own.
The contributions here may not be regular; but I do promise not waste my and your time just to keep myself in front of you.
Having said all that, from here on, this is what you’ll find here: nothing new.
I have spent most of my life looking backwards into history, and what really interests me in the kitchen is less of where we are going than where we have been.
Most food professionals nowadays spend too little time thinking about that past, and it shows. Cooking is no different from anything else: without a firm understanding of where we’ve come from, the cooking, no matter how clever, will have no roots, and without those, like spring lettuce pinched from its bed, it soon withers and is forgotten.
This page looks back to the kitchens of our past. They weren’t perfect, but they still define our kitchens present and future, whether we like it or not.
 Read More