Food - Bee Wilson on the flavour of the month
We are now at the peak of the short-lived asparagus season. Just as the stalks are getting nice and fat, the newspaper columns on the subject are at last thinning off. For the first two weeks in May, you could hardly open a supplement without finding some gorgeous green and purple and white picture of sprue or asparagus, accompanied by panegyrics on the unique selling points of this seasonal wonder, along with the same old recipes for plain steamed or grilled asparagus.
There is nothing wrong with this. Asparagus is indeed a fascinating vegetable, worthy of celebration. It is just that its annual appearance shows up the perils of the job of the newspaper recipe writer. Asparagus is the phew-what-a-scorcher of the food world. Coverage of it is so inevitable and contrived in its enthusiasm that you begin to wonder whether the rest of the year isn't equally predictable.
It must be hard being a weekly recipe writer - having to inject greed and urgency into passions you can scarcely be feeling at the point when your cold words meet the screen. Any reticence must be disguised with pretended addictions to the seasonal foodstuff of the moment. At Christmas, the writers express yearnings for marzipan and goose with stuffing. "Truth be told," they coyly confess, "I could eat mincemeat morning, noon and night. I have even been known to eat it straight out of the jar. Why save it for Christmas?"
Mysteriously, however, this overwhelming passion for mincemeat will lie dormant for another 12 months until it again becomes profitable to mention it.
Asparagus is rather different. Asparagus is so lovable, it is easy to express an unquenchable desire to post the buttery spears in your mouth and let the juices dribble down your chin, etc, etc. But what else is there to say about it? The best ways of eating asparagus are barely recipes at all. Snap the stalks at the natural point of breakage, steam and serve plain with butter. Plain with soft-boiled eggs or scrambled eggs. Plain with hollandaise. Plain with shaved parmesan. Plain with nothing but salt. I suppose you could use up a few paragraphs on the virtues of barbecuing or roasting the stalks rather than steaming or boiling them, but that would still leave a good few hundred words to kill.
You could use a few syllables on the difference between white Belgian asparagus (flavourless), purple Genoese asparagus (exotic) and spindly wild asparagus (delicious in risotto). Another few words on cooking times: should asparagus be crisp or soggy? In ancient Rome, if you wanted something done very quickly, you would say: "Do that in less time than it takes to cook asparagus." But raw, grassy spears are unpleasant.
The best way of yielding maximum verbiage is perhaps wild inconsistency. One year, you might get worked up about how lazy we all are, complacently eating our asparagus vinaigrette when we could be blanketing some delicately peeled javelins in sauce maltaise and baking them in puff pastry, dotted with quails' eggs. Another year, you might take the reverse attack and accuse anyone who so much as wets their stalks with overambitious lemon juice of baroque impertinence.
If you really wanted to flog your bundle of tips for all they are worth, you could give some recipes for preserving them in brine, as French cooks do. Robert May, in The Accomplisht Cook (1660), goes one better and buries them. Assuming his recipe works (and I must confess that I haven't tried it), you could then be churning out asparagus articles all year round.
"To keep asparagus all the year. Parboil them very little, and put them in clarified butter, cover them with it, the butter being cold, cover them with a leather, and about a month after refresh the butter, melt it, and put it on them again, then set them under ground being covered with a leather."
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