66 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
_ a second Raffaelle. Evelyn presented some shoots “raised at 
Battersea, in a natural, sweet, and well-cultivated soil, sixteen, 
each of which weighed about four ounces, to his wife, showing 
“what Solum, ccelum, and industry will effect. ” 
A really good soup, of special nutritive virtues, can be made 
with the tough ends of asparagus sprouts, cooked, and recooked 
in the same water until they have become soft, then mashed, and 
rubbed through a coarse sieve, adding a pint of milk thickened 
with flour, and a pint of the water in which the vegetable was 
boiled; also thickening this water with two tablespoonfuls of 
flour into which two tablespoonfuls of fresh butter are smoothly 
intermixed. 
Mrs. Earle (“third Pot Pourri”) found Asparagus quite 
poisonous in her case. She wrote to ask Dr. Haig how this fact 
might be explained. He then replied that as far as he knew 
Asparagus is harmless. But three years afterwards he wrote to 
her again, telling “‘ what he felt sure would interest her, that the 
Asparagus is the cause of all your troubles, when you eat it so 
freely in the Spring.” In a leaflet of his it is stated positively 
that the “ Xanthin of certain vegetable substances, peas, beans, 
lentils, mushrooms, asparagus, etc., is as pernicious as that of 
fish and flesh;” but this dictum is certainly questionable. 
Charles Lamb gave it as his opinion that Asparagus seems as 
a vegetable food to inspire gentle thoughts. Dickens narrates, 
in David Copperfield, concerning Dr. Blimber’s educational 
establishment at Brighton, where little Paul was placed: “It 
was a great hot-house in which there was. a forcing apparatus 
incessantly at work ; all the boys blew before their time. Mental 
green peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus 
all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones, 
too) were common at untimely seasons, and these from mere 
sprouts of bushes, under Dr. Blimber’s cultivation.” 
Medicinally a fluid extract is made from Asparagus tops by 
the manufacturing chemist, which proves most helpful in dropsy 
(whether because of obstructed liver, or of defective heart action), 
by augmenting the flow of urine, and thus carrying off the 
dropsical effusion. Teaspoonful doses of this fluid extract should 
be given twice a day with one or two tablespoonfuls of water. 
The chemical constituent principles on which Asparagus 
depends chiefly for its action on perspiration, and urination, are 
sulphuretted, and phosphuretted hydrogen. 
