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Asparagus

If ever there was a vegetable made for indulgence, it’s asparagus. It has the thrill of luxury – no other vegetable has that Cadillac alley, platinum status. There’s no need to get too fancy with asparagus or dream up inventive ways to cook it when the old favourites have such perennial charm.

Some European countries, such as France and Germany, favour blanched white asparagus with its characteristic violet shading and yellow tips, which is grown by mounding up earth around the emerging spears to protect them from light. This type of asparagus has a taste not unlike that of salsify. The British, in company with the Spanish, prefer their asparagus green and grown in full light that gives it a flavour rather like peas. Purple and red asparagus are also popular with keen gardeners. They tend to turn green when cooked, so are better used ultra-tender and fresh, thinly sliced in salads. All shades of asparagus taste special in their own way.

Asparagus ranges in size from the young, slender ‘sprue’ to the thicker ‘kitchen’ and jumbo grades that have a more developed flavour.

Asparagus is one of those vegetables, like corn on the cob, that deteriorates rapidly after cutting. The older asparagus is, the more it dries out and develops a bitter, tinny taste. Wizened, greying lower stalks of asparagus are a dead give-away. Tender fresh asparagus should have tight, firm tips and the stalk, when pressed lightly with your nail, should still feel moist and sappy within. If you put pressure on a spear it should ‘snap’ and look moist inside. It should never be pliable and woody. Fresh-cut British asparagus easily upstages the imported stuff that has come to us over long distances by road and sea or air. This is partly because it is fresher: from a taste point of view, jet-lagged imports from thousands of miles away just can’t compare. But there is also a school of thought that because it grows more slowly in our cooler climate, it develops a fuller flavour.

Things to do with asparagus

• You can’t put a foot wrong if you roast or griddle asparagus – rubbed in olive oil and cooked for just a matter of minutes, until tender – then anoint with good extra virgin olive oil and liberal shavings of Parmesan.

• One of the best and simplest dishes to celebrate asparagus is to dunk the lightly cooked spears into soft-boiled, freshly laid eggs, then dip the eggy spears into breadcrumbs fried in butter.

• If you have been feasting on a glut and have exhausted the familiar treatments, it might be time to go for a more gutsy approach and serve your asparagus with a salsa verde (see Things to do with herbs), punchy with anchovies and mint.

• Use thin sprue asparagus, lightly cooked, in a salad, with crispy lardons of bacon, soft-boiled egg and fried croutons.

• Thick and medium spears, simply steamed, deserve the effort of an hollandaise or beurre blanc sauce.

• A quick, weekday asparagus risotto feels like a weekend treat and is a good way to use cheaper, less regularly shaped spears and stems.

• Delicate pale green asparagus soup, made with stems and topped with a drizzle of cream and a couple of tender tips, is one of the classiest soups. You’ll want to sieve it if your stems are a bit woody.

Is asparagus good for me?

Asparagus is packed with beneficial micronutrients. It is rich in beta-carotene, which is needed for healthy skin and good vision; folate, which protects against birth defects; soluble fibre, which slows down the rate at which sugar is released into the bloodstream; and potassium, which helps moderate blood pressure. It is also one of the best sources of rutin, which, along with vitamin C, helps protect the body from infections. A mild diuretic (it makes you pee), it has been recommended traditionally for ailments associated with sluggish digestion and fluid retention. Don’t be alarmed if your urine has an unusually strong smell after eating asparagus; this is quite normal and harmless. Asparagus contains certain sulphur-based compounds and their breakdown products in digestion are thought to be responsible.

How is asparagus grown?

The plants or ‘crowns’ that produce asparagus spears take about three years to become established and longer still to become fully productive. They do best in a well-drained rich loam – the most prized type of agricultural land. Some growers cover the asparagus mounds with polythene to warm up the soil and encourage the spears to grow earlier. The delicate spears have to be harvested by hand; mechanization is out. White asparagus is particularly time-consuming to harvest because only the very tip of the spear peeps out from the soil, so it takes an experienced eye to spot it.

Although we eat some Spanish asparagus that precedes our native crop by a couple of weeks, most of the out-of-season asparagus we eat in Britain comes from Peru. Peru has cornered the world market for this vegetable because the US decided to subsidize its fledgling asparagus industry in order to encourage alternatives to the cultivation of coca, the raw material for cocaine. So Peru’s asparagus exports have grown rapidly over the past decade, but by several accounts the benefits have not filtered down to the asparagus workers or improved their lives. A number of charities have reported that asparagus workers operate in sub-standard conditions and poverty and that child malnutrition is increasing. In the arid Ica region where Peruvian asparagus production is concentrated, this thirsty export vegetable is also depleting the water resources on which local people depend.

Is asparagus a green choice?

The carbon ‘foodprint’ of air-freighted asparagus is very heavy indeed. It is not necessary to have such foods supplied from abroad and their air- freighting, shipping and trucking, with its energy-intensive, fuel-guzzling cold chain, is undeniably environmentally destructive. Binge on asparagus when the British crop is in season, then forget about it for the rest of the year.

Where and when should I buy asparagus?

Throughout mainland Europe, no vegetable stirs the same excitement as asparagus. Its appearance in mid-April on market stalls and on special restaurant tasting menus heralds the arrival of early summer. In the UK, our asparagus season is short and sweet, six to eight fresh, green, sappy weeks from the third week of April onwards, depending on the weather. Harvested after the ‘hungry gap’ of March and early April when British and Irish vegetable production is at its lowest ebb, asparagus provides a welcome splurge of fleeting, green vegetable after the sturdy roots and brassicas of winter months and before the tender salads of summer. British asparagus has become very sought after in recent years and there is more of it around as growers now increasingly see it as a worthwhile crop to cultivate.

THE MOST EAGERLY AWAITED SPRING FOOD

Before imported foreign spears became a fixture on supermarket shelves, asparagus, which had traditionally been an eagerly awaited spring food, most strongly associated with the Vale of Evesham, but also East Anglia and Cambridgeshire, was regarded as a gourmet food, rubbing shoulders with caviar, truffles and oysters. In 1931 an Asparagus Society was set up at Cambridge University’s Trinity Hall to savour the new season’s crop. The customary start date of the British asparagus season was 1 May.

Until the 1980s, most people’s experience of asparagus – unless they had the good fortune to live in one of our traditional asparagus-growing areas such as the Vale of Evesham – was tinned. Tinned or bottled asparagus is a far cry from fresh, but it is one of the more successful tinned vegetables. Then imported asparagus spears began to appear in swanky, fine-dining establishments. In recent years, however, asparagus has become a fixture in our restaurants, shops and supermarkets. No longer a precious, seasonal crop, a steady flow of air-freighted imported spears has made asparagus available all year round. Is this progress? Most definitely not. Familiarity breeds contempt. It’s hard to get worked up about the 365-day supply of jaded, imported asparagus, but the arrival of our fantastic native crop never fails to thrill.

Will asparagus break the bank?

You always pay quite a lot for good asparagus. Weight for weight, it can cost as much as meat or fish. But the compensation is that even a few spears can elevate a dish based on otherwise unremarkable ingredients and make it seem rather luxurious.

Never waste the bottom part of an asparagus spear. Once peeled, the tender inside can be chopped and added to soups, quiches, pastas and risottos. Thicker, less tender stems are good liquidized in soup along with cheaper green vegetables, such as leeks and peas.