ASPARAGUS FIVE WAYS
Read more on asparagus after the recipes.
Here are five mini-recipes for preparing asparagus. One element that I always find works well with asparagus is something tart or acidic—lemon juice, for example—as a foil to its native bitterness.
In parchment paper packets with salmon: Make a sealed packet, out of parchment paper or aluminum foil, of a filet of salmon, a quarter bunch of asparagus, a few strips of white of leek, 1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil, grinds of black pepper, a pinch of kosher salt, and sprinklings of any fresh green herb of your liking (dill, thyme, flat leaf parsley, etc.). Bake on a sheet in a preheated 400-degree oven for 10 minutes. Put the packet on a plate for serving; the aromas on opening are nearly the best part.
In a risotto: Make a standard risotto, using vegetable stock. A couple of minutes before it is finished, for every cup of rice with which you started, add 1 pound of asparagus cut into 2-inch pieces. Then finish, stirring, with the zest of a small lemon, its juice, 1/2 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves, and 1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.
As a stir-fry with spiced beef and mushrooms: Marinate for an hour 1/2 pound of New York strip steak, sliced thinly, in 2 tablespoons each orange juice and soy sauce, 1 tablespoon chili paste, 3 sliced scallions (no dark green parts), 3 cloves minced garlic, and 1 teaspoon minced ginger. Stir-fry in an oiled wok or skillet, in batches and for 4 minutes per batch, with 1 pound asparagus cut into 2-inch pieces and 1/2 pound cleaned and sliced mushrooms.
Roasted: In a preheated 425-degree oven, roast on baking sheets and for 12-15 minutes, 2 pounds cleaned and trimmed asparagus tossed with 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes and almost too much kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Serve with squeezes of lemon juice.
With pasta and eggs: Prepare your favorite long-form pasta (spaghetti, linguine, or the like). About 2 minutes before it is finished, add to the boiling water 1 pound asparagus, trimmed and cut in half and lengthwise into long strips. Drain, reserving 1 cup cooking water, and return to the pot with 1/4 cup unsalted butter or ghee and 1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, adding enough reserved water to make a sauce. Top each serving with a poached egg and freshly ground black pepper.
Photo from Christine Siracusa on unsplash.com
Asparagus, that simplest of foods, is also one of the more complex, both as a plant and in its history.
Like the allium family kids such as garlic, leek, onion and shallot, asparagus long was thought to belong to the lily family. (It’s now known to be more closely related to plants such as agave or yucca.) With lilies, interesting stuff happens both above and below ground. Sometimes we eat from both places; sometimes not.
With asparagus, just from above.
Its history and growth both go back millennia and cover vast lands, due mostly to its ubiquity as a wild plant in most of Asia, Europe and Africa. Anyone could pick and eat it. Two thousand years ago, in his “Natural History,” Pliny used the word “asparagus” to mean “any long green stem” that could be eaten as a vegetable.
When France began to farm it in earnest around the year 1300, both the difficulty of cultivating it and its fragility once harvested caused it to become exceedingly rare and quite costly. In his 1825 “La physiologie du goût,” Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin relates that while the average daily wage, at that time, was “2.50 francs a day,” a bundle of asparagus cost “40 francs.”
The official Latin binomial name is asparagus officinalis, a reference to its prevalent use as a medicine in the Middle Ages, especially for its diuretic qualities. (The “officina” was a monastery’s dispensary. “Eat your vegetables” used to mean “Take your meds.”)
Medievalists didn’t know about the amino acid asparagine that was responsible for those diuretic qualities—an amino acid that you can obtain from many other foods—they just knew that, as Bartolomeo Platina wrote in his (and the very first printed) cookbook, “De honesta voluptate et valetudine,” that asparagus “soothes the stomach gently, causes peeing, and is good for pain in the kidneys.”
About that peeing, a moment. After eating asparagus, “Why such a delicious delicacy as asparagus,” asks Lorelei Mucci, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School, “results in such a pernicious odor?”
They are due to the asparagus metabolites produced in the body and expelled (rather promptly, you may note) in the eater’s urine. (Their technical names are methanethiol and S-methyl thioesters.) But here is a surprising find from Dr. Mucci and her associates: Only 40 percent of people have the gene that allows for detecting what they call this “rather malodorous bouquet.” The other 60 percent? Noseblind. (The technical name is “asparagus anosmic.”)
Everyone makes it; only some detect it. So watch too-casual indictments that “he who smelt it, dealt it.”