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In May and early June, when my grandfather said, “Come, Billy, let’s go cut some grass,” he wasn’t thinking about the lawnmower (in those days a wooden shafted reel type cutter made mostly of cast iron and a bear for a skinny boy to push).
In my grandfather’s garrulous garden slang, “grass” was short for asparagus (etymology: Persian asparag “sprout;” Greek aspharagos; Latin sparagus; English asparagus and Modern English slang sparrow grass; my grandfather’s grass. He grew a lot of it, and we ate it all, daily, for weeks, when my grandmother steamed it in shallow, seething water, beneath the chattering lid of her largest skillet. Buttered lavishly, sprinkled with salt and pepper, the stalks held aloft in our fingers, we tipped our heads back, fed the asparagus into our mouths, butter dripping down our chins, and violating good manners (using the same exception that permits holding chicken drumsticks and wings with our fingers). In my memory, we ate the asparagus with potato salad and sautéed brook trout we caught that morning.
Asparagus at my grandparents’ farm was a mixed blessing. My grandfather harvested it, and grandmother trimmed it at the maximum length that would still fit the 12-inch skillet, butts and tips right up against the edge. The butt ends were fibrous and chewy, and my grandfather took perverse delight looking around the table at us as my grandmother and I dutifully chawed away at the tougher parts. I usually had a small bird’s nest of green-ish fiber balled up in one cheek that I had to work on, cud-like, for a while before I could get it all down.
But the top seven or eight inches of each spear were the finest food of spring, particularly accompanied by the lemon-spritzed, crispy-skin of sautéed trout.
My mother, of a more citified bent when it came to cooking, had long switched from her grandmother’s battered early edition of Fannie Farmer (1906) to a succession of editions of The Joy of Cooking (in many homes still America’s kitchen bible). Both cookbooks advocated snapping off the woody asparagus butts and using a vegetable peeler to tenderize the lower ends of the stalks (In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child recommends paring asparagus right up to the tip to maximize tenderness.)
My grandfather did not permit peeling at all. “The vitamins are in the outer layer. Best part,” he’d say, grinding grimly away at the woodyness and the fibrous skin. (He also argued, regarding meat, that “the sweetest meat is next to the bone,” and that his favorite part of a roasted bird was what my father’s staunchly Protestant family called “the Pope’s nose” but that my French-Canadian ancestors named “the part that goes over the fence last.”
I’m sure my grandfather did not know the word “hypocrisy” though he was expert at practicing what it meant. What he advocated that I do with excessively chewy asparagus, on the one hand, and his barely repressed smirk of satisfaction upon poking a chunk of lamb fat or the tip of an especially plump, blanched asparagus spear into his mouth, on the other hand, was revealing. I often learned more from watching what food he put into his mouth than from what words came out of it.
My writing about my ancestors’ early 20th century asparagus behavior must seem like talk of ancient history. But asparagus itself goes back to pre-history. The Egyptians of the Great Pyramids era and their Hyskos and Hittite rivals to the northeast ate asparagus as an aphrodisiac, carved phallic sculptures and architectural pillars in imitation of asparagus spears . . . and undoubtedly puzzled as we do today over the paradox that a vegetable could taste so good and appear so erotic yet stink up our urine.
Food scientists have identified, among the compounds constituting asparagus, asparagusic acid, a sulfur-containing compound that seems to be found exclusively in asparagus. It’s a non-toxic substance that produces a sulfurous odor which some say is similar to the odor of rotten eggs, natural gas, or even skunk spray. Scientists have better things to do in these pandemic times than delve into this, but those cited on the internet seem to be in general agreement for the moment that it’s got to be asparagusic acid that causes our pee’s peculiar odor after we eat a few spears.
About the phallic aspect of asparagus: at girls’ boarding schools in my teen years, a girlfriend told me, it used to be the custom that any foods that looked remotely phallic at all were served cut up into small bites. This was, of course, silly and no doubt generated more daydeaming and joking than simply letting things alone would have done. Stone Age European cultures, the ancient Chinese and Indonesians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans all suffered vastly greater health difficulties than we do, more frequent and more disastrous interruptions to pregnancies. Women in appalling numbers died in childbirth. And they all, therefore, paid more devout attention to worship and ceremonies felt to be propitious to the procreative processes. The shaming of body parts is one of the sad errors of our modern civilization. Any food that is healthful, tasty, and served at table, regardless of its symbolic appearance, should be revered and celebrated, and not mocked.
Or discarded. The bottoms of the asparagus stalks, like the tougher parts of broccoli stalks, cut up and cooked down, contribute to great soup bases. Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking recipe for cream of asparagus soup, for example, teaches us to save asparagus tips separately, and only minimally steam them before we add them whole to a soup base we prepare by cooking down and puréeing the stalks and other solids in a meat broth to which we stir in heavy cream and suitable seasonings.
Other interesting things people do with asparagus: Iceland enjoys nearly free and abundant hydro-electric energy, and endless volcanic thermal-spring-emitted hot water. Near the capitol city, Reykjavik, vast greenhouses, lighted, heated, and watered by the thermal springs and glacial melt, produce year-round fresh fruit and vegetables, notable among the latter asparagus. And on treeless Iceland’s grassy tundra, sheep have thrived and have clothed and fed the Icelanders since founding settler Ingolfur Arnason arrived there from Norway in CE 874. In more modern times, sliced smoked lamb-wrapped stalks of blanched asparagus, preceding a steaming bowl of Iceland’s plokkfiskur codfish stew makes an unforgettable meal.
Asparagus for breakfast? Absolutely. Try a few spears of steamed asparagus beside a serving of eggs Benedict, with a little of the Hollandaise sauce dribbled on the green stalks as well. In fact, eggs, asparagus, and cheese (especially feta cheese) are one of those perfect marriages. Slice up a couple of steamed asparagus spears on the diagonal, each slice no more than an inch long, mix with an equal amount of crumbled feta, and fold into the middle of an omelet. Really good.
Lunch? Jacques Pépin makes an easy asparagus salad that consists of diagonally sliced cooked asparagus, toasted bread crumbs, minced scallions, chopped hard-boiled egg, and olive oil. Jacques is French, so his full recipe contains a couple of fancy steps you’d have to look up (in Heart and Soul in the Kitchen, p. 298).
Still lunch time? I have a passion for food that goes with spectator sports, especially hot dogs – and especially these days. From time to time I buy a package of Mackenzies locally made pork and beef blend hot dogs and a bag of small submarine sandwich rolls. I peel and sliver (again, on the diagonal) one or two raw asparagus spears, and brown them in a thin film of olive oil in a frying pan along with a hot dog. I smear a dab each of mayo and Dijon mustard in a mini sub roll, pack it with the slightly charred hot dog and the grilled asparagus, and crack open a beer. Better than anything at Fenway Park.
But then there are folks for whom asparagus offends, or frightens, and Mike Hauser has addressed this phobia face to face. He brings me back to my childhood cheek-filled cud of woody stalk and fiber as he writes:
You’ve heard of the children of the corn
This my friend is much scarier than that
Here to make sure you eat all your vegetables
Adults of the Asparagus
Set in a quaint New England town
Could be in any novel by Stephen King
Making sure both the young and the old
Eat their veggies raw, sautéed, or steamed
They’ll make you sit by yourself at the table
With the dog behind the door when they lock it
Before you leave the table they’ll frisk you
And have you empty out all of your pockets
You will shudder with butter on the side
Salting to taste if you must
Making sure you eat every last bite
Adults of the Asparagus
June 30, 2020 at 11:30PM
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And you'll sit there 'til you eat your vegetable - The North Star Monthly
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Vegetable
