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Asparagus a LA Francaise

A French-style asparagus dish cooked with butter, flour, sugar, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Asparagus a LA Francaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Boil a large pot of water with salt and a few grains of baking soda.

  2. Add the asparagus and cook for 10 to 12 minutes until tender.

  3. Drain the asparagus and spread it on a clean cloth to dry.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a clean saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the asparagus and sauté for 8 to 10 minutes, shaking the pan often.

  3. Sprinkle in the flour and sugar, then pour in boiling water to nearly cover the asparagus.

  4. Boil rapidly until little liquid remains.

  5. Stir in the beaten yolks of the eggs.

Serve

  1. Serve the asparagus hot, heaped on a dish with the sauce adhering.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Asparagus + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together936 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Asparagus + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Is the main vegetable, cooked until tender and then finished in the butter sauce.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, carrying flavour into the sauce and coating the asparagus.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the sauce clings to the asparagus.
Eggs
Their beaten yolks enrich and thicken the sauce as it sets.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten yolks of the eggs. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently; if the sauce is too hot or boiled after adding them, they can scramble and turn grainy instead of smooth and creamy.

Swap the asparagus

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, sugar, egg):

  1. Chivefits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Asparagusthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, egg. 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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