Skip to content

Asparagus Soup

A historical recipe from The Virginia Housewife, by Mary Randolph (1860).

A historical recipe

The Virginia Housewife; Or, Methodical Cook, by Mary Randolph (1860). Project Gutenberg eBook #12519.

From an old book: a historical recipe, not current advice. Its methods, additives and storage may be unsafe by today's standards.

Source and licence

From The Virginia Housewife, by Mary Randolph (1860). Digitised by Project Gutenberg, eBook #12519 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12519). Public domain in the USA; its status may differ elsewhere.

Read the original Public domain in the USA

What was changed: As printed, from the book's text; Project Gutenberg's header and licence removed. Ingredient lines were read out of the text by a program. A historical recipe, not current advice.

United States. Associated with United States by the book is about Virginian cookery (Cooking -- Virginia); the recipe itself names no place (confidence 0.4). "Associated with" means only that the evidence named here links this recipe to that place. A recipe isn't labelled as representing an entire country because a source associates it with one, and regional origins are kept where the source gives them.

Create an image with FoodStudio Made by our AI generator from your own prepaid SecondMem credits. We keep no picture from the source.

Ingredients

Method

  1. Take four large bunches of asparagus, scrape it nicely, cut off one inch of the tops, and lay them in water, chop the stalks and put them on the fire with a piece of bacon, a large onion cut up, and pepper and salt;
  2. add two quarts of water, boil them till the stalks are quite soft, then pulp them through a sieve, and strain the water to it, which must be put back in the pot;
  3. put into it a chicken cut up, with the tops of asparagus which had been laid by, boil it until these last articles are sufficiently done, thicken with flour, butter and milk, and serve it up.