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Asparagus Points with Fine Herbs

A dish of boiled asparagus points flavored with butter, shallot, parsley, nutmeg, sugar, white sauce, and egg yolks, garnished with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Asparagus Points with Fine Herbs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Boil the asparagus points in salted water until tender.

  2. Plunge them into cold water and drain on a sieve.

Cook and serve

  1. In a sauté pan, melt the butter and add the chopped shallot and parsley.

  2. Add the asparagus, season with pepper, nutmeg, and sugar.

  3. Moisten with white sauce and let simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  4. Just before serving, stir in the egg yolks until the mixture sets.

  5. Transfer to a dish and garnish with fried bread croutons.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Asparagus + shallottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they set, giving it a silky, binding texture.
White sauce
Adds moisture and body, so the asparagus simmers in a creamy coating.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the shallot and parsley flavour into the dish.
Asparagus points
Form the main body of the dish, tender after boiling.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks just before serving. Egg yolks set when heated, so overheating or stirring them in too early can curdle or scramble the sauce. Adding them at the end, over gentle heat, keeps the texture smooth and creamy.

Swap the asparagus

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, shallot, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, sauce):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Asparagusthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, shallot, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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