Casting Aspersions on My Asparagus: Part 2

Of all our spring vegetables, asparagus is the one most eagerly anticipated. The flavour, texture and visual extravaganza that is home-grown asparagus has the potential to turn a meal into an adventure and a gastronomic delight. Even the choice of wine to go with it is an adventure – you need to find one that asparagus won’t turn metallic – like wine drunk from silver goblets. A zingy Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc might work. (See Casting Aspersions on My Asparagus* – Part 1.)

In our temperate climate, asparagus is only in season for the spring season: We snapped off the first spears mid-September and ended with asparagus sandwiches on the last day of November.

Once the head has poked through the soil, it grows up to 10 cm a day and with our 20 plants producing several spears each, that’s a heap of asparagus to harvest every third day. So, it’s never a matter of 3 or 4 tastefully arranged spears – typical when we eat out. At home it’s anything from 10 to 20 boiled spears tossed onto a plate. The food-free expanses of background plate, modest portions, and the aesthetics of nouveau cuisine don’t stand a chance at our dinner table.

Neither do fancy ways of eating asparagus as noted in etiquette books; along the lines of: Pick up the asparagus spear, near the end of the stalk, between the thumb and index finger of your left hand. Or the use of dainty ‘asparagus tongs’ to achieve the same result. And never cut it up!

Asparagus can certainly be an adventure when it comes to getting it from plate to mouth. Robert Morley, the English actor, wit and gourmand, said, on a visit to our country some forty odd years ago, that it was the weekend and New Zealand was closed. In the same interview on our national radio, he said something to the effect that good table manners flew out the window when eating asparagus – that asparagus was slithery, flopped around and dripped as you attempted to get it in your mouth. His point is illustrated beautifully in the 1975 edition of The New Emily Post’s Etiquette:

By reputation this is a finger food, but the ungraceful appearance of a bent stalk of asparagus falling limply into someone’s mouth and the fact that moisture is also likely to drip from the end, cause most fastidious people to eat it – at least in part – with the fork. … pick up the ends in the fingers if you choose. But don’t squeeze the stalks or let juice run down your fingers.

I’d definitely be using a knife and fork if it was dripping with a vinaigrette dressing or covered in hollandaise sauce! Or coated with butter, as in the dilemma that confronted Sunday Telegraph columnist Sophia Money-Coutts sometime mid- 2017 when dining with an aficionado of good table manners, someone she said who “approaches lunch with the reverence of a bishop approaching an altar”:

… The asparagus arrived. Stalks as thick as a thumb and shiny with butter. …

My knife and fork froze in mid air. PANIC. I was about to disgrace myself in front of Sam. But I was also wearing a white shirt. And I didn’t fancy the chances of being able to manoeuvre a stalk of asparagus into my mouth without dripping butter down my shirt. So it was either finish the asparagus course looking like the sort of person who should be fed in a highchair. Or commit social hari kiri by deploying my knife and fork.

I picked the latter. …

When it comes to asparagus, I commit “social hari kiri” whenever and wherever asparagus is on the menu. I’ve even been known to clutch the middles of two spears in my right paw (so right hand dominant) and as they form an inverted U I’ll eat the two heads and two ends at once. But most of the time I use a knife and fork. For the sake of my good table manners, it’s a good job the asparagus season is a short one.

That’s all on modern-day homesteading at Little Owl Gully till next Monday. Thanks for your company. Bye for now.