In Praise of New Asparagus

As soon as mud season is over, and the earth gives just a little underfoot, I go out to our 35-foot-long double-rowed asparagus bed, and begin my gardening year by pulling away last year’s dried old stalks and throwing them on the compost pile. We mulch that bed pretty heavily, and I pull the hay away from the places where I just cut the stalks, leaving small bald spots which I will watch closely now for the promise of new growth.

Usually around the middle of May, a few purple-headed asparagus tips begin to show themselves. We begin the fine calculations: how many days before our first dinner with fresh asparagus? So much depends on weather. If it is warm and sunny the asparagus shoots up pretty quickly; if it turns off chilly, it slows right down, stalls out.

The first asparagus is never so numerous that we can eat it as anything more than a garnish: perhaps a few stalks blanched and laid on the salad. Gradually more and more appear, and then the dinner comes when we have so much that it is the main dish.

I have always thought it would be fun to eat so much asparagus that I would get tired of it. But that hasn’t happened yet, even though I have tried. Maybe it is because there seem to be enough different ways to cook with it that it always seems good. Or maybe it is because all winter I have eschewed the perky little bundles of rubber-band-wrapped asparagus sitting in a tub of murky water at the grocery store. By the time our own asparagus is ready, I have a deep longing for it. Why, I’m so old that I can remember a time when asparagus was a seasonal, spring-only vegetable. It comes from away now, I guess, any time of year, probably involving Chile or Ecuador, another part of that fiction we all labor under of eating “fresh” vegetables that are weeks old.

An asparagus bed is an exercise in commitment. There is no reason to plant one if you think you will move in three years. It takes deep digging. Jamie dug ours with his characteristic care, a trench, three feet deep, two feet wide, well lined with compost and manure, and the asparagus crowns spread out and covered with all that soil he dug out in the first place. Our yard has as many large rocks per square foot as an oatmeal cookie has raisins, so there was a lot of evidence of glaciers to haul away, too. Then came the wait and with it willingness to forebear harvesting for the first couple of years to allow the asparagus to settle in, grow out to plumy stalks, before we could begin to cut and eat it.

It takes precious little effort to fix it. I cut it off at ground level, bring it inside and lay it on the cutting board. I bounce a heavy knife along the stalk from the bottom at half-inch intervals until the knife goes through, which eliminates any tough part. Some pare the bottom of the stalks. Then into the pan it goes.

There are about three weeks that we can feast on asparagus, starting with the beginning few spears, working up to regular side dishes of it lightly steamed or sauted in butter, then the few meals when it is a topping for pasta, or the main part of risotto. I make cream of asparagus soup, or we have it simply on toast with Parmesan cheese. I usually freeze some, snapping the stalks and blanching them (or not) and freezing them on cookie sheets to knock off into freezer bags when they are frozen enough to rattle like marbles. Gradually, I let more and more of them grow out to tall stalks.

A few more shoots of green emerge as July and August wear along, and if I am paying attention, I can snag them to add to summertime potato or pasta salads. Or perhaps, lay them along side blanched green beans, sugar snap peas, carrot thinnings, broccoli or cauliflower flowerets, and fresh spears of cucumber on a crudits plate with aioli sauce (a fancy name for garlicky mayonnaise.)

Oddly enough the deer seem not to eat it (I ought not speak too soon), and it has formed an effective hedge along one end of the garden. Friends come and pick stalks of asparagus ferns for flower arrangements. I weed the bed on my hands and knees, crawling through the tunnel it forms from one end to the other and all summer Millie, our cat, lies under the swaying plumes on the deep bed of hay mulch, sleeping, and dreaming, I am quite sure, not of asparagus dinners.