PolitiCook.net

Green Gifts from the Mediterranean

There’s not much better than steamed asparagus served with a piping hot Hollandaise. As a young lad, I used to know where wild asparagus grew in the nearby woods. Needless to say that my great grandmother and I gathered quite a few for our dinner, simply steamed and served with melted butter with a dash of lemon. I feel that a recipe involving asparagus and the perfect Hollandaise sauce is on the cards!

Asparagus is believed native to the eastern Mediterranean lands and Asia Minor. It commonly grows wild over much of that country today and also in the trans-Caucasus, Europe, and even in many places in the United States where it has escaped from cultivation. It thrives along riverbanks, shores of lakes, and even close to the salty waters of seacoasts, tolerating considerable salt in the soil in which it grows. It has been found “wild” in so many places that there has been much argument as to where it actually originated. I romanticized that it only grew in my neck of the woods, but now I know better. Before asparagus was used for food, it had quite a reputation as a medicine for almost anything from the prevention of bee stings to heart trouble, dropsy, and toothache.

The Greeks apparently collected asparagus only from the wild, since they gave no directions for cultivating it. The Romans, however, as early as 200 B.C. gave detailed gardening instructions that would be considered good today, except for one thing-they preferred the seed of wild plants for planting. Three hundred years later, such progress in development had been made that the cultivated forms were consistently as good as the best wild plants.

In Roman times asparagus was not only eaten “in season” but was dried for later use. It was simply and quickly prepared by boiling the dried shoots. The Emperor Augustus is supposed to have been very fond of it and to have originated a saying, “Quicker than you can cook asparagus.”

North Europeans and Britons have been eating asparagus for as long as there are any records about them. Its introduction into the Americas and other lands made no ripple worth noting at the time, but because of its old popularity it was presumably taken to those lands by early voyagers. It is now a universally popular vegetable.

Asparagus is unusual, among garden plants, in its flowering habit. While nearly all of the vegetables bear both stamens and pistils (containing pollen cells and egg cells, respectively) on the same plant or in the same flower, asparagus has two kinds of plants. About half bear only staminate flowers; the others bear only pistillate flowers from which the little red seed-bearing fruits develop. Both kinds must be grown near each other if seeds are to be obtained. The pistillate plants produce larger and better shoots than the staminate plants, but not quite so many of them.