How to be an asparagus superhero
Raw, steamed, roasted, grilled: For two months straight, I ate asparagus like I was savoring each minute of spring.
Editor's note: The following essay is excerpted from "Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone," edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler and published by Riverhead Books.
By Phoebe Nobles
Read more: Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel
April 17, 2007 | Last spring, I ate asparagus every day for two months. I turned into a superhero of asparagus.
In my secret life, I was the Spargelfrau. Perhaps it wasn't the right name for a superhero. I got it from a magazine article a friend sent me about asparagus season in Germany, which happens there at roughly the same time it happens in Michigan -- May through June. The article said some German villagers get so excited about their asparagus, they eat it every day while the season lasts.
The Spargelfrau, I think, is actually supposed to be the woman who sells asparagus, not the one who buys it all up and eats it. (It strikes me now that Spargelfrau could mean wife of asparagus. I don't know if domestic union with a vegetable merits a pair of Underroos.)
In some famous little asparagus town in Germany, there is a statue of the uber-Spargelfrau, fat cheeked and grinning, a sort of wholesome vixen. She has a cart on wheels. She is holding armfuls of bronze asparagus.
Surrounded by bushels of real greens in an open market, the Spargelfrau makes a charming newspaper photograph. But I picture her there, in the town square in winter, covered in snow, holding that dead, cold asparagus out to nobody. Poor Spargelfrau. In real life, asparagus heroism is temporary. It is intense. There is a great deal of asparagus all at once. The hero must ingest this -- raw! steamed! roasted! grilled! -- and then, abruptly, stop. There are no memorials. By July the heroism must be forgotten in an orgy of peppers, summer squashes, pole beans. Nowhere in the world should there be asparagus in winter.
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The winter in Michigan is long, dark, and damp. There are three things you can get fresh here year round: beef, bread, and beer. Everything else comes from far away. Everything else, in winter, comes from a Sysco truck, along with millions of Styrofoam coffee cups. If we lived close to the land, Neander-Michiganders, we would hoard potatoes. As it is, we import vegetables, pulpy and withered.
But who needs them? The weather, perhaps like winter somewhere in Germany, makes you want nothing but beef and beer. If you know what you are doing in a Michigan winter, you will greet depression with depressants. Pad your dying soul with flesh. Give up and get fat. Hibernate. In the impossible spring your cheeks will be round enough for the right spargel grin. A grin worthy of the triumph of cathedral tips breaking through the ground: the asparagus is here!
The asparagus is all that's here, in the farmer's market in May, aside from a few stalks of rhubarb. We are still wobbly on our indoor legs. Under our eyes are deep circles of leftover winter despair. We have been waiting so long for a vegetable or fruit. The spring equinox back in March was irrelevant, cruelly crafted for a lower latitude. We started thinking of strawberries when we saw the first crocuses killed by frost, but that was a pipe dream. The strawberries still aren't quite ripe -- but when they are, they will be dark and concentrated, almost as though they've had to furrow their brows.
Michigan is a place, for me, of two firsts: living alone, and depending heavily on the seasons. Before I moved here, I couldn't avoid the fact that I lived in an international pleasure dome: New York City.
I shopped at the Greenmarkets as much as I could. I kept up with the slight seasonal differences between Jersey tomatoes and upstaters, and distrusted calendar-defying hydroponics. Often, especially at Union Square, there was overwhelming bounty. I always liked a tiny Greenmarket for providing a challenge or imperative: oh, it's only the tomatillo people today. I would have to make salsa. On assignment.
The dawning and dwindling ends of the growing season are also good for imposing menus. There might be only radishes and arugula in the early spring. In fall there are nothing but oven fillers: long-cooking squashes and apples that eventually give way to warty gourds and Christmas wreaths.
But even though there are real farms and farmers in the regions around the city, New York defies reliance on the season. When pickings were slim in the winters I lived there, I just bought pineapples and papayas at the Korean bodega. I could get these at midnight if I wanted to. The growing seasons of the rest of the world were ours. Eating local in New York City can mean eating mung bean-sprouts that have arrived from somewhere far away via Chinatown, or fishing a cake of tofu out of your local deli's counter.
Of course there are supermarkets where I live now. I buy bananas. I buy lemongrass and cilantro. I don't stop myself from trying (usually failing) to get a good fig, even if you can't grow one anywhere near here.
But partly because I don't have a car, the easiest and most satisfying place for me to shop is the farmers market. I can walk there. And in summer, the Michigan crops -- cherries, corn, eggplants, leafy greens, tomatoes, blueberries, apricots, squashes -- are miraculous. In late fall, though, I fail to make the shift to the supermarket, with its Chilean grapes, its Texan greens. I keep going to the farmers market even when there is almost no food. From November through April, I wander under the corrugated shed roof, along the walkways where farmers huddle by portable heaters on Saturday mornings to sell apple fritters and cider. We greet each other with mutual suspicion -- what are you doing out here? In our eyes is a lean and hungry vegetable craving. In our cheeks is an apple doughnut, our serving of fruit and fiber and happiness for the day.
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So, even if you don't like asparagus, you can understand the thrill of seeing those bundles of slim stalks standing upright on the tables one early Saturday morning. It's still chilly out. Maybe you haven't had your first cup of coffee. But the asparagus tips sparkle, in your green-starved eyes, like jewels. Their live green is more alluring than money. (For the purposes of this essay, all asparagus will be green. What is white asparagus? It is grown in secret caves, as mushrooms are. It is a long, spooky fungus. It is naked and phallic. White vegetables do not make me want to live.)
The only reason you don't like asparagus is that you have eaten it in winter. You have eaten it cooked to olive green. The stalks were fat and woody. In your mouth, an inner slime spurted out of an unchewable skin. Some of this skin you removed from between your teeth like dental floss.
The real spring asparagus is picked at dawn, if you are very lucky, and driven here in just thirty minutes in crates. Take the most slender stalk from the rubber band. You can bend it into a full arc, but still snap it crisply just above the base. The tip is like a baby's ear, sheathed in the slightest fuzz. The stem is luminous with moisture, as if it might ooze a drop from its center. Eat it raw, right away, first thing in the morning. There is only a hint of astringency left on your teeth.
The asparagus superhero feels, at this moment, that she could eat all her asparagus raw for the rest of spring. But there is going to be a lot to eat. Eventually, so as not to go crazy (though she wears an aura of craziness already; though the craziness is part of the wonder of spring), she will have to diversify. She will have to find recipes.
Shopping for one at the farmers' market, especially as the season goes on and the vegetable multiplies, can be a challenge. Farmers want to get rid of a lot in a little time. They'll be packing up by two o'clock. They'll give you a bargain if you take two, or three for eight. They'll sell a peck. They grew this for you. How can you insult them by trying to buy single servings? The bounty of the land does not come in single servings.
The Spargelfrau comes home with enough asparagus to feed a sumo wrestler. She wraps the bottoms of the stalks in a wet paper towel to keep them springy in the refrigerator. On no day of the week will she be so ungrateful as to leave it off the menu.
Next page: This is the pee from a healthy vegetable!
