The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Let asparagus hit the sweet spot and be glad you’re not a Victorian housemaid
It’s a special time of year. The asparagus is ready to be cut and there are few vegetables as delicious as the green spears picked and eaten from the field the same day. It’s an all too short season for this delicious spring delicacy – just six weeks – and the earlier in the season you can get your first picking, the sweeter it seems to be.
It’s not a common crop for this part of the north east but Sandy Pattullo has grown it for years on his farm at Eassie, midway between Glamis and Meigle. The Doyenne saw the For Sale sign and made a quick diversion to pick up two bundles. We had some for supper, steamed for 10 minutes and served with lashings of melted butter – it could have been a hollandaise sauce – as an accompaniment to grilled salmon and sauteed potatoes. Sinful but a treat that doesn’t happen often.
My father claimed you should never drink wine with asparagus, but he was an inveterate whisky drinker and inclined to freewheeling excess in some of his opinions. Our own experience is that a flowery, dry white wine such as a Riesling is an ideal accompaniment – whisky most certainly isn’t!
A potentially embarrassing side effect of eating asparagus is that our digestive systems metabolise an apparently benign vegetable to produce an unmistakable and powerful bouquet in the slops. Housemaids’ despair they called it back in Victorian times.
So, what was it that accounted for the long-suffering housemaids’ despair? In the days before that inventive master plumber Thomas Crapper developed the “flush-out toilet”, we relied on chamber pots, shoved below the bed, to ease those moments of disturbed sleep in the night. In the morning, it was part of the housemaid’s daily routine to dispose of what Mrs Beeton, in her unrivalled guide to Household Management, discreetly referred to as “the slops”.
A housemaid’s life was hard enough as it was, but the description tells us how offensive they must have found it to go into their employers’ bedroom and be greeted by the fragrant memory of the previous evening’s asparagus supper, adding unwelcome tribulations to their already onerous duties.
All this isn’t exactly dinner table small talk but sometimes it’s an unlikely combination of ideas that triggers off my train of thought when I sit down to write my weekly column. Anyway, you can’t just flush away disagreeable aspects of social history because they might be a bit “iffy”.
Daughter-in-law Katie gave us this tasty recipe. Snap off the tough, woody ends of the asparagus spears. Wrap bacon (or parma ham) round bundles of 4/5 spears with a sprig of rosemary (lemon thyme is even zingier) in the middle. Place in an ovenproof dish with quarters of lemon between the bundles. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and cook in the oven for 20 minutes at gas mark 5 or 180 degrees.
Once cooked, squeeze the juice from the lemon segments and add to the other juices in the dish. Sprinkle with slivers of parmesan and serve with a hunk of crusty brown bread.
Numerous medicinal benefits are attributed to asparagus, and in Greek mythology it was prized as an aphrodisiac because of its supposed erotic shape.
Others can get excited about the eroticism of food but I’m more interested in exploring textures and the food’s true flavours. There’s more to taste than meets the tongue, which is why asparagus is so moreish.
● I stopped at the top of Stracathro Brae looking across to the foothills of the Grampians and the entrance of Glenesk. There’s an abundance of colour in the landscape. The great yellow blocks of daffodils have all but died off but are replaced by shimmering fields of oilseed rape. I’m forever surprised by the speed – almost overnight it seems – with which the rape comes into flower from being green foliage.
The yellow, coconut-scented whin, in full bloom since March, has now been joined by broom. The broom grows seed pods like peas which dry out, turning black. In the summer heat the pods explode, scattering the seeds and propagating the shrub.
Down in the long, flat plain of Strathmore, brown ridged fields are evidence that farmers are busy planting their potato harvest. Frothy white blossom, like cascades of Chantilly lace, hangs off the geans – our native Scottish wild cherry trees.
And the fresh, emergent green of the
leaves on the beech hedges along our roadsides all contributes to lifting my spirits.
More and more I think what a lucky chap I am, to be where I am and doing what I do. I never stop seeing and hearing and experiencing new things, which is one of the great pleasures of writing this column. Ten years ago I’d have said “How interesting” about so much. Now I say “How exciting”, because, however long my allotted span is, it’s 10 years shorter now than it was 10 years ago.
A dry white wine such as a Riesling is an ideal accompaniment