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Sanskrit Sex, Persian Poets,
Mr. Ramsbottom’s Fatal Mistake,
An Abbé’s Apoplexy, and Madame
Pompadour’s Underwear
Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts.
CHARLES LAMB
Pray how does your asparagus perform?
JOHN ADAMS TO HIS WIFE ABIGAIL
To my mind, the problem with asparagus is the planting instructions, which begin: “Dig a trench.” Experts disagree as to the precise size of trench — some recommend a relatively feasible six-inch-deep furrow; others demand an excavation a foot deep and a foot and a half wide; and Martha Washington’s Book of Cookery directs hopeful asparagus growers to “digg ye earth out a yerd deepe, & fill up ye place againe with old cows dung.”
Still, a trench is a trench, and trench — face it — smacks of heavy labor, misery, mud, and World War I. “Dig a trench” is the dark side of gardening, the stuff of blood, sweat, back sprains, and blisters.
That said, once you’ve dug your asparagus trench, you won’t have to do it again for a good long time. Unlike most denizens of the vegetable garden, asparagus is a perennial, and the average asparagus bed, once established, will continue to produce asparagus spears for twenty to thirty years.
Even better, asparagus isn’t particularly picky. It adapts cheerfully to a wide range of circumstances and soils and could even thrive, NASA scientists tell us, in the chilly red dirt of Mars. A sample of Martian soil, pinched up in 2010 by the robotic arm of the Phoenix Mars Lander, was found to be mildly alkaline, with traces of magnesium, sodium, and potassium — potentially fertile ground for diehards like asparagus and turnips, though future Martians may not be able to grow strawberries.
The bottom line is that asparagus is one tough cookie. Beds can be started from seed — a long-term proposition — but a better bet is from crowns, which are the base and roots of one- to two-year-old plants. Even so, you won’t have harvestable asparagus spears for at least three years, so be prepared.
I’m sensitive to this, having moved multiple times and left behind a cross-country trail of immature asparagus beds. In fact, I’ve become suspicious of asparagus. “Plant it and you’ll move” has been our rule to date, and we’re awfully fond of where we’re living now. Still, it’s such a scrumptious vegetable that I hate to pass it up. And easy too, once you get past the trench.
Historically, asparagus is pure sex food. Its aphrodisiacal renown dates to antiquity and is derived from the undeniably penile shape of the emerging stalks, which pop suggestively out of the ground in early spring, just as a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. Pliny the Elder, in his formidable thirty-seven-volume Natural History, written in the first century CE, cites asparagus as a sex booster, as does the near-legendary second-century Sanskrit sex manual, the Kama Sutra of Mallanega Vatsyayana. In the latter, a chapter titled “On Personal Adornment; On Subjugating the Hearts of Others; and On Tonic Medicines” provides a lengthy list of recipes to bolster lackluster lovers, among them a paste of asparagus boiled in milk, with pepper, licorice, honey, and butter.
In western Europe, asparagus was among the touted remedies for the low-libido Renaissance man, along with prunes, garlic, nettle seed in wine, and dried fox testicles. In nineteenth-century France, bridegrooms were fed three courses of asparagus in anticipation of their wedding nights, and the salacious stalks were banned from the menu in girls’ schools, for fear of inflaming the imaginations of susceptible teens.
Despite — or perhaps because of — its propensity for provoking unbridled lust, people have been cooking asparagus at least since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Ripe and ready for the pot, asparagus is pictured in murals on the walls of Pompeii, and Plutarch describes Julius Caesar feasting on asparagus in northern Italy, though somewhat unhappily, since his host had drenched the spears in myrrh instead of olive oil.
The Asparagus Family Tree
Traditionally, asparagus has been considered a member of the Lily family (Liliaceae), an immense taxonomic conglomerate comprising some 280 genera and 4,000 species. Among these are such botanical kissing cousins as the tulip, the Easter lily, the onion, the fall crocus, and the dragon tree, whose bright-red resin — known as dragon’s blood — is used as a varnish, possibly in the finish applied to Antonio Stradivari’s famous violins.
Some taxonomists, however, now suggest that asparagus deserves a family all to itself — Asparagaceae, a smaller, cozier grouping of a mere handful of genera and a couple of hundred species. Among these last are the edible garden asparagus, Asparagus officinalis, and the asparagus fern, Asparagus densiflorus, the feathery green stuff often found fluffing out florists’ bouquets.
The Romans seem to have liked their asparagus al dente, since “quicker than it takes to cook asparagus” is a catch-phrase from the time of the Emperor Augustus meaning “lickety-split.” The first-century Apicius, the oldest known Roman cookbook, sometimes titled De Re Coquinaria (The Art of Cooking), recommends that “to be most agreeable to the palate,” asparagus spears should be peeled, washed, and immersed in boiling water backwards, by which the author means cooked in a tall narrow pot such that the spears stand upright with their tips poking out of the water. He doesn’t specify how long one boils — presumably not very, unless using the asparagus in his subsequent recipe, which involves mushing it up and baking it in a pie along with pepper, wine, oil, fish sauce, and figpeckers, which are European warblers.
As well as a vegetable Viagra, asparagus was touted as a specific for everything from congestive heart failure to kidney stones. According to Pliny, asparagus sharpened the eyesight and alleviated elephantiasis. It was also a preventive for pains in the chest and spine, a remedy for diseases of the intestines, a cure for jaundice and “the stings of serpents,” and, Pliny reports solemnly, “It is said that if a person is rubbed with asparagus beaten up in oil, he will never be stung by bees.”
The sad truth is that asparagus, medically, isn’t good for anything much, though recent research from Korea’s Cheju National University School of Medicine indicates that it may ease the miseries of hangovers. Asparagus extracts were found to increase the activity of crucial enzymes in the liver and expedite the metabolism of alcohol, suggesting that a hefty meal of asparagus should precede a binge at the neighborhood bar.
Cultivated asparagus largely vanished from Europe with the fall of Rome, though it remained a favorite in the Middle East. A tenth-century Persian history, Muraj al-Dhahab (“Meadows of Gold”), includes a lush description of a literary symposium on cooking held at the court of the Abbasid caliph Al-Mustakfi in which poets struggled to outdo each other with mouthwatering descriptions of dishes. The offering of Baghdadi poet Kushajim (nicknamed “the Scribe”) was a twenty-two-line paean to asparagus in sauce, which, after luscious comparisons of asparagus to gold, silver, pearl rings, and cream embroidery, ends with, “Should pious anchorite see such repast / In sheer devotion he would break his fast.” The drooling caliph promptly sent to Damascus for asparagus spears.
Invading Arabs, who occupied Spain from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries CE, brought asparagus with them. Reportedly its popularity at the Iberian dinner table can be traced to one man: Ziryab (“the Blackbird”), a musician at the ninth-century court of Córdoba, whose charisma and creativity allowed him to establish himself as an arbiter of culture and home decor. His closest modern equivalent is Martha Stewart, and, like Martha, Ziryab’s knack with table settings and window treatments made him enormously rich. Along with the joys of asparagus, he is said to have introduced the Spaniards to tablecloths, toothpaste, the lute, crystal (instead of metal) wine glasses, the style of wearing one’s hair “with a fringe on the forehead” (bangs), and the custom of starting a multicourse meal with soup and ending it with dessert.
The legendarily lovely Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Madame de Pompadour, became King Louis XV’s mistress at the age of twenty-four and remained the royal favorite until her death in 1764. A shade of pink and an upswept hairstyle are both named after her, and the French champagne glass was supposedly based on the shape of her breasts. An eighteenth-century British army regiment was named after her, nicknamed “The Pompadours” for the purple facings of their uniforms — reputedly the color of her underwear. It was also the color of her asparagus, a particularly salacious plump Dutch white variety with purple tips.
This version of her famous recipe comes from the great gourmet Alexandre Grimod de la Reynière (1758–1837):
“Dress and cook the asparagus in the normal way, plunging them into boiling salted water.
“Slice them diagonally into pieces no longer than the little finger. Take only the choicest sections, and, keeping them hot, allow them to drain in a warm napkin while the sauce is being prepared.
“In a bain-marie (water bath), work ten grams of flour and a lump of butter together, a good pinch of nutmeg, and the yolks of two eggs diluted with four spoonfuls of lemon juice. After cooking the sauce, drop in the asparagus tips and serve in a covered casserole.”
From Spain, Ziryab’s asparagus spread to France, where its prime proponent was Louis XIV, during whose seventy-two-year reign — which extended from 1643 to 1715 — the Palace of Versailles was built and the accompanying Potager du Roi (King’s Kitchen Garden) was planted. The 25-acre Potager surrounded a courtyard with a fountain, and was overlooked by a terrace from which the king, who was fond of plants, could watch his gardeners in action. It was presided over by Jean-Baptiste de la Quintinie, a lawyer turned master gardener, whose duty it was to oversee the 29 individually enclosed gardens, the 12,000 fruit trees, including 700 of the king’s favorite figs, and the 6,000 asparagus plants in the royal hotbeds, from which the court was able to enjoy asparagus as early as December.
Equally appreciative of asparagus was Madame de Pompadour, by far the cleverest of Louis XV’s many mistresses, who served it in a sauce of butter, egg yolk, nutmeg, and lemon, a dish still known today as “Asperges à la Pompadour.” (See page 17.) She may even have occasionally cooked it herself: in the heyday of the royal affair, Madame de Pompadour maintained a summer house at Versailles to which the king would periodically repair — disingenuously announcing to the court that he was going hunting — for private suppers.
Asparagus reached England by the sixteenth century and was in commercial cultivation by the seventeenth, when it was grown primarily around the village of Battersea and sold in London markets as “Battersea bundles.” Samuel Pepys’s diary for April 20, 1667, finds the author buying asparagus — “brought home with me from Fenchurch Street a hundred of sparrowgrass, cost 18d” — which he and his wife ate for supper with salmon. Asparagus was on the menu for the coronation feast of James II in 1685, along with a hundred and forty-five other (largely nonvegetable) dishes, among them pickled oysters, pigeon pie, rabbit ragout, and roast fawn.
In the early nineteenth century asparagus was immortalized by Jane Austen in Emma (1815), when the chattery Miss Bates has a disappointing encounter with a fricassee of sweetbreads and asparagus. The dish, untasted, was snatched from under her nose at the table and returned to the kitchen at the behest of Emma’s hypochondriacal father.
Nobody knows exactly where the ancestral asparagus came from. It appears to be a native of the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor — wild asparagus (Asparagus protratus) is found scattered along the sandy cliffs of the European coastline. Scattered is the operative word: due to cliff erosion, trampling tourists, and competing scrub plants, wild asparagus is now an endangered species.
The “wild” asparagus stalked by American forager Euell Gibbons, however, is still up for grabs. Unlike many modern garden plants — the needy and dependent corn, for example — asparagus thrives perfectly well without us. It is not native to North America; our widespread wild plants are domestic runaways, offspring of cultivated A. officinalis that hopped the garden fence and headed for the wide-open spaces.
Asparagus arrived in North America early and did well. John Josselyn, author of New-Englands Rarities Discovered (1672), describes it as thriving “exceedingly,” and in John Lawson’s A New Voyage to Carolina (1709), an account of his 600-mile trek through the wilderness on foot and by canoe, he comments that “Asparagus thrives to a Miracle.” By the time Swedish botanist Peter Kalm began his North American travels in the late 1740s, he saw asparagus growing wild through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. A testy letter of 1737 from Thomas Hancock — uncle of John, of the memorable signature — to his English seed dealer is a backhanded tribute to the resilience of asparagus: “. . . the Garden Seeds and Flower Seeds which you sold Mr. Wilks for me and Charged me £6.4s2d Sterling were not worth one farthing. Not one of all the Seeds Came up Except the Asparrow Grass.”
The part of the irrepressible asparagus plant that we eat is the early shoot or sprout; if left alone, such sprouts develop into tall ferny branches bearing small bell-shaped greenish yellow flowers. The ferny foliage looks leafy but, strictly speaking, isn’t: the narrow fronds are actually modified photosynthetic stems called cladodes or cladophylls.
The flowers are gender-specific. A. officinalis is dioecious, bearing male and female flowers on separate plants. Following pollination by visiting bees, female plants produce bright red berries, each containing up to eight seeds. The berries are adored by birds, who have been the prime movers in liberating garden asparagus into the wild.
Traditional asparagus cultivars, such as the heirloom Mary and Martha Washington varieties, produce half male and half female plants. Newer cultivars, however, such as Jersey Giant, Jersey Knight, and Jersey Prince, are all male. Male asparagus is generally bigger, yummier, and three to four times more productive than female, which shows the advantages of putting one’s energy into brawn rather than seeds.
“Not one of all the Seeds Came up Except the Asparrow Grass.”
Colonial America appears to have eaten a lot of asparagus. In 1709, Virginia planter William Byrd II noted in his diary, “At noon I ate nothing but squirrel and asparagus,” and planter Landon Carter complains in 1777 of feeling “very heavy and Sleepy” after his dinners, which condition he blames — repeatedly — on asparagus. George Washington grew asparagus in the “boxed Squares” of his garden at Mount Vernon; and Thomas Jefferson planted it, along with two hundred and fifty other varieties of vegetables, in his 1,000-foot kitchen garden at Monticello, where it was painstakingly mulched with tobacco leaves and fertilized with manure. Since asparagus, like crocuses and robins, is a harbinger of spring, Jefferson annually recorded the dates when it first appeared on the Monticello table — usually, in balmy Virginia, by the first week in April.
He also seems to have been fussy about its preparation. Mary Randolph’s cookbook The Virginia Housewife, or Methodical Cook, first published in 1824, and known to contain many Jefferson family recipes (Mary was a cousin), advises scraping the asparagus stalks, tying them into bundles of twenty-five, and tossing them into boiling water containing a handful of salt. “Great care must be taken to watch the exact time of their becoming tender,” Mary cautions, “take them just at that instant, and they will have their true flavour and colour; a minute or two more boiling destroys both.” She suggests serving asparagus on buttered toast.
Commercial asparagus is pricey because, since the stalks appear over a period of weeks, the harvest is prolonged and has to be done by hand. Historically it has been considered a food for the tables of aristocrats, sometimes nicknamed the “royal vegetable” or the “food of kings.” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, French epicure and author of The Physiology of Taste (1825), was appalled to find asparagus selling for 40 francs a bundle, at a time when the average workman earned 2½ francs a day. “They are certainly very fine,” he snapped, “but at such a price no one but the King or some prince will be able to eat them.” John Loudon writes in The Encyclopedia of Gardening (1822): “The asparaginous class of esculents may be considered comparatively one of luxury. It occupies a large proportion of the gentleman’s garden, often an eighth part; but does not enter into that of the cottager.”
As late as the 1930s, asparaginous esculents were apparently still the preserve of the sophisticated rich. In “Asparagus,” a poem of that period by comedian Marriott Edgar, his hero Mr. Ramsbottom wins five pounds at the races and decides to bring a present home to his wife.
He saw some strange stuff in a fruit shop
Like leeks with their nobby ends gone.
It were done up in bundles like firewood —
Said Pa to the Shopman, “What’s yon?”
“That’s Ass-paragus — what the Toffs eat”
Were the answer, says Pa “That’ll suit,
I’d best take a couple of bundles
For Mother’s a bobby for fruit.”
Being ignorant of asparagus, however, Mr. Ramsbottom ends up giving away all the green tips to friends who (suddenly, suspiciously) claim to raise rabbits. He comes home with a handful of woody ends, which his wife mistakes for kindling, and then pronounces too damp to light the kitchen fire.
Most who got their hands on asparagus were both savvier and less willing to share. Among the best of asparagus stories is the one told of Bernard le Bovier de Fontanelle, irrepressible French writer and gourmand, who died in 1757, just one month short of his hundredth birthday. (He attributed his longevity to strawberries.) Planning a private asparagus feast, Fontanelle was dismayed to receive an unexpected guest, the Abbé Terrasson, whom he felt compelled to ask to stay to dinner. Resignedly, he ordered his kitchen staff to prepare half of his treasured asparagus with the abbé’s favorite white sauce, and the other half, as he himself preferred, in an oil dressing.
Just before the meal was served, the abbé suddenly crumpled to the floor in a fit of apoplexy. Fontanelle dashed to the kitchen, shouting frantically, “The whole with oil! The whole with oil!”
An almost inevitable adjunct to a feast of asparagus is funny-smelling pee. Asparagus transforms “my chamber-pot into a vase of aromatic perfume,” enthused Marcel Proust, but most of those who experience it are a lot less complimentary. Dr. Louis Lemery wrote in his Treatise of All Sorts of Foods (1702) that “Sparagrass” causes “a filthy and disagreeable Smell in the Urine.” “A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreeable Odour; and a Pill of turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in a little-known piece of Frankliniana titled “Fart Proudly,” originally sent as a snarky letter to the British Royal Society in 1781.
A common comparison of the disagreeable odor is to the smell of rotten cabbage, which as everybody knows is perfectly awful. Studies of the phenomenon are complicated, however, by the fact that not everybody produces an asparagus odor, and of those who do, not everybody can smell it. Experiments to determine which is which involve either analyzing urine samples by gas chromatography or, more subjectively, persuading volunteers to sniff pots of pee. The culprit in asparagus appears to be asparagusic acid, which in the human digestive tract is converted to a handful of noxious sulfur-heavy compounds, among them the particularly pungent methanethiol, the nose-assaulting essence in skunk spray.
Along with asparagusic acid, asparagus contains a raft of more congenial components, notably folate, fiber, potassium, and vitamins K, A, and C. It also contains a good deal of asparagine, one of the twenty amino acids that serve as the building blocks for proteins. Ten of these, including asparagine, are non-essential amino acids, meaning that our bodies can synthesize them from other compounds; another ten are essential, meaning we can’t produce them on our own, but must acquire them through eating. Asparagine was the first of the amino acids to be isolated, discovered in 1806 by French chemists Louis Nicolas Vauquelin and Pierre Jean Robiquet, who extracted it from and named it after asparagus juice.
How to Eat Asparagus
“Although asparagus may be taken in the fingers, don’t take a long drooping stalk, hold it up in the air and catch the end of it in your mouth like a fish. When the stalks are thin, it is best to cut them in half with the fork, eating the tips like all fork food; the ends may then be taken in the fingers and eaten without a dropping fountain effect! Don’t squeeze the stalks, or hold your hand below the end and let the juice run down your arm.”
Emily Post’s Etiquette, 1922
American asparagus is almost invariably green, though it is also available in an anthocyanin-laden purple and a bleached and ghostly white. White asparagus is simply green asparagus, buried. Popular in Europe for its smooth buttery taste, white asparagus is created by mounding sandy soil over the beds to shield the growing plants from direct exposure to the sun, which ordinarily induces the manufacture of chlorophyll and turns the stalks green.
Germans are so passionate about their pallid crop that during the spring asparagus season — Spargelzeit — visitors annually converge on the Asparagus Triangle in Baden-Württemberg, where the town of Schwetzingen styles itself the “Asparagus Capital of the World.” The point of Spargelzeit is, of course, to eat as much asparagus as possible, preferably at every meal, though the area also features asparagus celebrations with chosen Asparagus Queens, asparagus-peeling contests, an Asparagus Cycling Trail, and a three-story Asparagus Museum in a fifteenth-century tower in Freistaat Bayern.
The actual asparagus capital of the world these days is in Peru. The recent Peruvian asparagus boom is an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, a beefed-up and academic big brother of Murphy’s Law, which states that intervention in a complex system often leads to unanticipated and sometimes disastrous results. In this case, the complex system was the global economy, the intervention was the U.S. government’s War on Drugs, and the unanticipated consequence was the fall of American asparagus.
In the early 1990s, the American government, in an attempt to persuade Peruvian farmers to grow something other than coca — the immensely profitable raw material of cocaine — began to subsidize Peruvian asparagus. Under the tenets of the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA), passed in 1991 and renewed in 2002, Peru is allowed to export its asparagus to the United States tax-free — a financial advantage of such magnitude that American asparagus farmers, faced with it, have toppled like dominoes. Pre-ATPA imports of Peruvian asparagus totaled 4 million annual pounds; today we bring in 110 million pounds each year. It’s not clear that this vegetarian windfall has made much of a dent in the Peruvian coca industry, but American asparagus growers in the top asparagus-producing states of California, Washington, and Michigan have taken a dive.
There’s even a movie about it. In the spirit of Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger and Me, which chronicled the economic collapse of Flint, Michigan, after the closing of the General Motors auto factories, Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly’s Asparagus! traces the awful impact of governmental drug-war policies on Michigan’s rural Oceana County. Once the “Asparagus Capital of the Nation,” Oceana has traditionally made its living from asparagus, while developing an accompanying local asparagus culture, featuring an annual Asparagus Festival, an asparagus-costumed dance troupe, an asparagus comic-book hero (Super Stalk), and the world’s tallest asparagus cake.
Today not only the farmers of Oceana but hundreds of asparagus farmers nationwide have gone out of business, taking with them a distinctive way of life. Community pride and sense of identity, writes De Mare, often center around local crops. When we lose them, we lose sight of who we are.
The grassroots solution to the erosion of local food and farms is to eat locally. Local eaters now even have a name all their own — locavore — selected as the Word of the Year in 2007 by the Oxford American Dictionary. The term was coined by California local eater Jessica Prentice, cofounder of the online community Locavores, but the concept has been promulgated since the 1970s by Alice Waters, founder of Berkeley’s famous Chez Panisse restaurant. Waters’s passionate support of organic, locally grown, and seasonally appropriate food has changed the nature of American eating — although, admittedly, local eating calls for more ingenuity and self-sacrifice in some places than in others. Where we live in northern Vermont, for example, local eating in February means last summer’s canned tomatoes and the hope that maybe the cat will catch a squirrel.
Still, today more and more people are tackling “100-mile diets,” from the book of the same name (The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating) by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon of Vancouver, British Columbia. The couple, who began their local-eating project on the first day of spring in 2005, resolved to eat nothing that could not be obtained within a 100-mile radius of home.
Still, the most environmentally friendly local eating undeniably comes from one’s own backyard. Which is why, this season, I’m going to dig an asparagus trench.