THE KISS OF SPRING
Shaved raw and scattered on pizza with hazelnuts and wild onion flowers. Wood-roasted and served with snapper bacon. Struggling to breathe under a puree of courgette with capers and cured egg yolk.
Extreme Makeover: The Asparagus Edition is upon us. My social media feed has gone green — and so have my gills.
Across the country, chefs are taking the seasonal delicacy and turning it into the culinary equivalent of a reality television show bathroom reveal.
Nobody needs an $8000 gold bathtub. And the vegetable once humbly known as “sparrow grass” definitely does not need orange foam or black garlic or white anchovies. Like cargo pants or mason jar salads, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Records show restaurants have been gilding the asparagus for some time. In 1958, a recipe for “a royal Dutch cocktail” combined the vegetable with cream, sherry, ginger syrup, two oranges and copious amounts of diced chicken.
In 1987, a recipe for “creamed asparagus with a difference” turned out to be ... soup. Asparagus is picture-perfect (ask Manet). Asparagus needs nothing more than steam, butter and salt (ask my mum).
So why can’t chefs leave it alone? I’m almost certainly blaming the wrong people. There is definitely not enough profit in the hospitality industry to invent dishes nobody wants to eat. The fault is with foodies. Their incessant quest for The Next Big Thing has forced the ruin of The Actual Thing. (Documented asparagus-adjacent atrocities from the 1980s include a whole baby salmon stuffed with oysters and mussels poached in white wine and garnished with pineapple, potato croquettes and asparagus spears topped with a shrimp sauce.) Asparagus needs no embellishment. Witness the verse from 10th century Arabic poet Kushajim that described the raw ingredient so beautifully, it prompted the then-ruler of Baghdad to send out to Damascus for supplies.
“We have spears with crooked ends / that stand tall and proud / with most agreeable sleek shafts / and heads that crown their stalks ... “Elegantly arranged on platters / like neat embroidered goldwork / Adorning the hemline of the finest silk — o if only we had a bottomless well!”
At the current supermarket price of approximately $2 a spear, I can only concur with the poet. Inspired, I attempted my own ode to the bounty of spring: “Asparagus. How do I love thee? Let me count the wees ...” Anyway, it’s a work in progress.
Asparagus season is short. The Bluff oyster of the vegetable world will be gone before we know it but, this spring, its appearance took me by surprise. Once, we measured the passage of time by the depth of our jandal tan lines and the lengths of our sleeves. In modern times, we have exchanged seasons for one long and extreme weather event. It was a shock to wander into my local greengrocer (that excellent one, immediately adjacent to the Balmoral flea market) and discover gardens are still delivering on schedule.
I bought three bags, snapped off their woody ends, and boiled them until they were tender. Drain, cool and cocoon in slices of sandwich-sliced Molenberg, buttered all the way to the edges. Asparagus season is here. The world is still turning. For a few, brief bites, it felt like everything was going to be okay.
Canvas restaurant reviewer Kim Knight on the green spears that go straight to her heart