Esparagaut

[damont]

Well... for Stierbach Cooks Guild this month, I made "Esparagaut" from the Libre de sent sovi, specifically the translation that appears in Pleyn Delit (2nd edition anyway). Not the Thomas Longshanks version, sigh. This is basically fried asparagus drizzled with vinegar. I saw the recipe in the book, and said to myself, that should be fairly simple to make, and it's an excuse to have asparagus. It's June, and we didn't get good local asparagus this year, but Wegmans has a contact in Canada for asparagus... so they will still have decent asparagus at decent prices for another couple of weeks. Thus I can still get an asparagus fix for a little while.

Now my usual method for asparagus is: fill glass/Pyrex bread loaf pan with asparagus, add 1 cm water, cover with plastic wrap, nuke for 9 minutes or until the entire kitchen smells like hot asparagus. Pretty much foolproof and you can work on some other dish while the asparagus cooks in the microwave. But I was intrigued at the prospect of trying a new method, and this one was both SCA-period and not horribly complex (both good things for my purposes). This recipe wants you to parboil the asparagus, dredge it in flour, then fry it. Okay. Why parboil it first? Grace had the answer: because frying cooks pretty fast, and if you don't parboil the asparagus first the middles won't cook before the outside is overdone in the frying pan. But Grace wondered, why dredge them in flour? That one I could answer: to sop up water on the vegetable's surface, which otherwise will cool off the hot oil as it vaporizes, and the cooler oil won't cook the food fast enough to leave it ungreasy.

Being enamored of our modern machines and such, we cheated a bit. We prepped the asparagus, then instead of sticking it in hot water we put it in a plastic bag with some wet paper towels, then threw the whole mess in the microwave for 4-5 minutes. Took it out, let it cool off, then dried it well on paper towels before dredging in flour and frying. The nuking and drying may have gotten the asparagus TOO dry, as not a whole lot of flour stuck. We also shallow-fried them, relying on hot pan as much as hot oil to cook them, and the recipe may have wanted us to deep-fry them. But the recipe (at least the translation used) is ambiguous.

I suspect that actually parboiling in lots of boiling water, then dredging in flour without drying first, and deep-frying, would produce a rather different result than what we actually got. Mind you, I *liked* our actual result; the flour that did stick produced nice crunchy bits and it was all nice and tasty. (Though I agree with montuos that had we done this at home, we'd have used balsamic vinegar. Or at least wine vinegar. But we used cider vinegar 'cos that was what the host had...) I probably wouldn't want to cook asparagus this way most of the time, as it was considerably more effort than I usually put into asparagus. Nor would I likely want to serve it to a group of more than 20 people since the efforts involved don't have economies of scale. But for a dinner party, sure.

The other dishes went well too. Iustinos made a fish stew, which was VERY yummy, and I'd have taken seconds and maybe thirds if the heat hadn't mostly killed my appetite. Grace stuffed and baked two fish, a porgy (never heard of that before) and a bluefish. The porgy has too many bones for its size to work out well as a baked fish. The bluefish fared better on that score, but Grace thought it tasted a bit weird. Well, bluefish are notorious for eating anything and everything, and the flavor imparted thereby is not evenly distributed, so she either got an unlucky portion or she just doesn't like bluefish. I admit, bluefish is an acquired taste (which I've acquired). So *I* liked it anyway. Grace also made two carrot-pottage type things, with different "other" ingredients and seasonings; both were good.

Summary: it went pretty well, as did the dishes other folks tried out.

Comments

[byronczimmer.livejournal.com]

The foreman is usually an acceptable substitute.