In Defence of Asparagus Season (And Everyone Who Takes It Too Seriously)

I was not expecting to be told off at a market stall at half past nine on a Saturday morning, but here we are.

The man selling asparagus, a serious individual with the air of someone who has thought carefully about asparagus and arrived at firm conclusions, wanted to know when I was planning to eat them. Today, I said. He looked at me as if I had said next month. Today when, he asked. This evening, I offered. He exhaled slowly through his nose and began wrapping them anyway, the way a doctor wraps a prescription for a patient they don't entirely trust.

"Today," he said. "For lunch, ideally."

I did not have them for lunch. I am a deeply flawed individual.

This is what asparagus does to people. For about six weeks in spring — roughly April into May, depending on where you are and how the weather has behaved — a vegetable that spends the rest of the year in a tin or imported from Peru at the cost of considerable food miles suddenly becomes available fresh and local and the subject of more passionate opinion than most elections. People who are perfectly measured about other vegetables become evangelical. They talk about the window. They talk about not wasting it. They say things like "you really have to eat them the same day" with the gravity of someone discussing organ donation.

I used to find this faintly absurd. I have come around.

Asparagus — Asparagus officinalis, if you want to be precise about it, and several people I've met clearly do — has been eaten since antiquity with an enthusiasm that borders on the medicinal. The ancient Egyptians grew it. The Romans were devoted to it; the Emperor Augustus reportedly had a standing order that anything needing to be done quickly should be done "faster than you can cook asparagus," which suggests both a sense of urgency and a belief that asparagus cooked quickly, which is correct. By the seventeenth century, Louis XIV was so fond of it that his gardeners rigged up heated frames to produce it year-round, which is either visionary or excessive, depending on your feelings about the French monarchy.

For most of that history, asparagus was also enthusiastically recommended as a cure for a remarkable range of complaints: toothache, heart trouble, dropsy, and what one sixteenth-century herbal delicately described as "the stopping of the urine." Whether it helped with any of these is, as they say, unclear. What it does contain — demonstrably, and in ways that remain faintly startling if you weren't expecting it — is an amino acid called asparagusic acid, which the body converts into sulphur compounds, which are then processed in a direction I don't need to describe further. About a quarter of the population can't smell the results. The rest of us know exactly what I mean. This is not, I appreciate, the most appetising paragraph in food writing history. But in the spirit of full disclosure, it seemed only fair to mention it.

The asparagus at my market came in three varieties, arranged with a care that suggested taxonomy as much as commerce. Green, which is the standard English-speaking-world asparagus, with its grassy, faintly sweet flavour and the satisfying snap when it's properly fresh. White, which is the same plant grown under mounds of earth to keep the light out, producing something paler, more tender, more subtly bitter — the Germans and Dutch treat this as a national event, the Spargelsaison, during which restaurants devote entire sections of their menus to it and people drive to farm shops on weekday mornings with a focus that would be admirable in any other context. And purple, which I had not encountered before, and which turns green when you cook it, which the woman on the next stall told me with a slight tone of apology, as if the asparagus had promised something it couldn't deliver.

I bought the green. The man wrapped them in paper, handed them over, and reminded me one more time that today was better than tomorrow.

At home, I did what I always do when confronted with a seasonal ingredient at the peak of its powers: I looked up recipes until I was paralysed. There were recipes involving hollandaise, a sauce I admire in principle but which requires a level of whisking commitment I can rarely sustain. There were recipes with shaved truffle, which I do not have, and recipes with "a light miso emulsion," which I declined to investigate further. Someone on the internet had wrapped theirs in prosciutto and griddled them, which sounded excellent. Someone else had combined them with soft-boiled egg, preserved lemon, and sumac, which also sounded excellent. A third person had done something involving puff pastry that I bookmarked and will never make.

In the end, and this is, I think, the correct ending, I boiled them for four minutes, drained them, and ate them with butter and a small amount of salt, standing at the kitchen counter because it seemed excessive to lay the table for asparagus on a Saturday.

They were extraordinary. The vendor, wherever he was, was right about the timing.

This is the thing about asparagus season, and perhaps about seasonal eating more generally, which I recognise is a sentence that threatens to tip into the sort of solemn food writing that I try to avoid. But it's true that there's something specific about eating something at the exact moment it wants to be eaten. The asparagus in April is not the asparagus in a tin in November. It's sharper, brighter, more itself. It asks very little of you, some boiling water, some butter, the basic courtesy of not waiting too long, and in return it tastes like the season changing.

The man at the market knew this. He was not being pedantic. He was trying to help.

I should probably go back next week and tell him.