BRATTLEBORO — This time of year I find myself thinking about asparagus.
In 1954 my family moved from Maplewood, N.J., to East Bethel, Vt. I was four. We bought an old house and the small adjoining grocery store, which was quickly rechristened Coutant's Country Center. There we stayed until 1962: my mother, father, brother, me, and two dalmatians. My parents were fleeing the confines of suburbia for the simple country life, but central Vermont was pretty bleak in the mid-fifties, especially for flatlanders.
One of the small rewards of our relocation was an asparagus patch.
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My father had always been a gardener in his dreams. He devoured The Farmers' Almanac, Home and Garden, and Good Housekeeping with a relish only the non-rural can embrace.
Upon our arrival in Vermont he immediately started plans for a large vegetable garden. One day while mowing the grass he stumbled upon an overgrown asparagus patch . It was as if he had discovered the tomb of King Tut.
The mower stopped. Wooden stakes were found and pounded in to mark boundaries. Hand garden tools were brought out and inch by inch the patch was reclaimed, each handful of weeds carefully pulled so as not to disturb the precious spears that were just emerging from the ground. We ate them twice a day until they were no more and looked forward to their emergence in the spring for each of those eight years.
Then we moved to Montpelier. I grew up, and even though I turned out to be an enthusiastic vegetable gardener myself, I have never tried to raise asparagus.
Truth be told, I still yearn for my own asparagus patch, and part of me feels that I won't be a real gardener until I have it. But planting asparagus is a prodigious affair. No mere scattering of seeds on soil will suffice. Here are the instructions from one of my old gardening books on how to establish your bed:
Determine how many crowns will be needed. A good rule of thumb is 15 to 20 crowns per person. Soak crowns in water overnight before planting. Dig trenches in the selected garden area 12 inches deep and 4 feet apart. Add 1 inch of cow manure to the bottom of each trench and spread crown tendrils over the cow manure. Cover with 2 inches of soil. Pack tightly. Water the asparagus bed thoroughly to remove any trapped air pockets. This step may be omitted if expecting a heavy rain within 24 hours. Add two more inches of soil every two weeks until mounds slightly higher than the ground are achieved. Apply a heavy layer of mulch (hay, wood shavings, etc) to the bed once the spears begin to surface. Do not harvest until third year after being planted. A well planted bed will produce for 20 to 30 years.
So much for instant gratification.
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Asparagus is a perennial plant that is a member of the lily family, just like garlic, leeks, and onions, although its habit and cultivation are completely dissimilar. The name comes from the Persian asparag, or “sprout.” Its first cultivation was in Macedonia around 200 B.C.E.
During the 1st century, asparagus was so popular with the elite that Roman emperors had special workers whose job was to gather the choicest plants. Runners and chariots would carry the asparagus to the snowline of the Alps, where the spears would be frozen in hay for six months and then brought back to Rome for feast days.
Most asparagus grown in America is of the green variety and fluctuates from pencil thin to quite thick. Purple asparagus originated in Italy and has larger, sweeter spears.
White asparagus is quite popular in Europe. Its lack of color comes from the process of etiolation, or deprivation of light. Dirt is mounded up around the spears as they grow so the plants cannot produce chlorophyll and turn green. The flavor of white asparagus is a bit milder than other varieties, and this variety is often more tender.
Wild asparagus, made famous by Euell Gibbons in his 1962 bible for foraging, is thin and spindly. It reminds me more of shafts of wheat than spears.
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An asparagus plant has a mass of cordlike roots that send up shoots or spears in the early spring. Each spear is covered with small, triangular bud scales that are the leaves of the plant. If left unharvested, these buds develop into the fluffy stalks that are used as asparagus fern filler by florists.
We recognize stands of wild asparagus along Vermont roads by their tall, wispy tops moving in the wind. I have friends who mark these stands in midsummer and then return the next spring to harvest the slender stalks.
Asparagus grows very quickly. An established bed should be harvested frequently. An individual spear can grow up to 6 inches in 24 hours and can change from spear to fern in a day or two.
It doesn't really matter if you collect the spears by cutting or by snapping them. But do eat them the same day you harvest or buy them. Asparagus is a vegetable that deteriorates extremely quickly after being harvested, like corn. The sugar content drops, and the fibrous matter increases rapidly.
Those triangular buds should be tight and close to the spear. Once they have “brushed out,” they will turn into slime when cooked, so always look for spears that are deep green, firm, compact and all about the same size so they will cook uniformly. I squeeze asparagus before buying it (and artichokes as well) to see if they squeak: my test for freshness.
As with harvesting, to snap or cut when trimming the woody bottoms from the spears is a matter of personal preference. I snap.
Apart from freshness, the most important factor in steaming or boiling asparagus is speed. The average bunch takes around six minutes to cook in water. I begin testing it at five minutes. Life being filled with distractions, I confess to having overcooked them on occasion. After swearing profusely, I reserve the poor limp shoots for soup and see what else I have in the vegetable drawer for dinner.
My current method for cooking asparagus is roasting in a very hot oven. This produces crisp yet tender spears that are slightly caramelized on the outside with golden brown bits that are utterly delicious. Add a drip of olive oil, a scatter of sea salt, a humble squeeze of lemon. You have the base for many a tasty dinner.
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Here where I live in Brattleboro, there is an abandoned asparagus bed out in the field in front of the house. I walk out to it each spring and give silent acknowledgment to the hardworking souls who dug it in. I even occasionally imagine that I will reclaim it as my father did with the one in East Bethel.
But each year it stays overgrown and choked with weeds, barely able to send up more than a handful of spears. I usually break off a few and eat them raw on my way back to the house. Memory can feed the present as well as call back the past and in this case I am content with its provision.