Diary of a Shopkeeper, 9th May
I can’t remember when I first ate asparagus. It certainly wasn’t something I grew up with. As a boy in 1970s Aberdeenshire, vegetables were restricted to tatties, neeps, carrots and onions. (All frequently found in the company of mince.)
Salad was limp lettuce or, for a treat, Heinz salad in a tin. ‘Salad in a tin?’ cry younger readers. Hard to believe, but yes: diced tatties, carrots, peas and quite possibly neeps, all coated in in salad cream.
I loved it. In fact I’m slightly disappointed, now that I’ve checked online, to find it’s long-since discontinued. Never mind, there’s bound to be a hipster restaurant in Finnieston or Leith making their own version with kohlrabi, kale and quinoa, bound in a black miso mayonnaise. £9.50 or £18 as a main course. Something to look forward to next time I’m south.
It may have been on holiday in France 20 or so years ago that I encountered asparagus. Travel broadens the mind, but it also broadens the waistband.
Let me rephrase that. Travel broadens our experience of different foods and drinks, makes us more receptive to ingredients we’d previously not seen, or never suspected could be made delicious. Neep shaws, for instance. Here’s they’re something we cut off to get at the golden, globular root. But in Italy they’re a delicacy – cime di rapa – often sautéed with garlic and served in pasta or with fennel-flecked sausages. A revelation.
We see this all the time in the shop. Folk come in and say, ‘I had a fantastic wine when I was on holiday in Greece…’ or ‘Did you know they made pasta in Spain? I tried it in Valencia and it’s great...’ Or at least we used to see it: not so much this past year, because no one’s been on holiday. Maybe by the end of 2021, or at least the middle of 2022, folk will be asking us again to track down Sagrantino wine or Monte Enebro cheese. And we’ll be delighted to try.
Back to asparagus. You can buy it in supermarkets any day of the week, of course, but for nine months of the year it comes all the way from Peru. Why Peru has cornered the market in asparagus farming I don’t know. To be honest I don’t care, because I never buy it.
Apart from the problem of the outrageous airmiles, there’s also the question of quality. And the quality of the asparagus flown in from South America is generally far inferior to British-grown. Generally that means English, with the bulk of it coming from the Vale of Evesham near Worcester. However, the best asparagus I ever ate was Scottish, bought from a farm shop in Fife, and there are now a handful of dedicated producers in various locations across Scotland.
Does anyone grow it in Orkney? Not to my knowledge, but I’d love to be corrected. The northmost I’ve ever eaten was grown by a friend just outside Elgin – but it should be possible here, for the very patient gardener: it takes up to three years from planting before you can take your first harvest.
Luckily, cooking and eating the spears doesn’t take long at all. Steaming or boiling is the method you read about most often, but I think grilling or frying is best:
Cut off the rough ends of the spears, slice any thick ones in half length-wise, leaving thin ones as they are.
Put a splash of oil in a frying pan or ridged pan, and get it up to a high, searing temperature.
Drop in the asparagus and let it roast for five minutes or so, giving it a shake a couple of times to turn the spears over.
And that’s it! It’ll come out tender, pleasantly charred in places, crunchy, as green as a summer meadow, and with its unique grassy flavour turbocharged by the slight caramelising of the roasting. Season with salt and serve.
Its great with a poached egg on top for breakfast, to accompany chicken or fish in the evening, or by itself with nothing but a knob of butter on top. You can also half-cook it this way, then finish it off in the oven on a puff-pastry base, with a suitably melting cheese on top: a hard Alpine cheese like Gruyère or Comté would be good. (But so would many others!)
Can you drink wine with asparagus? In quite a few wine-pairing guides its singled out as a troublesome ingredient, but I refuse to be defeated. My heartiest recommendation is for a glass of Grüner Veltliner. GV is Austria’s signature grape and is, as the name suggests, so fresh and limey it tastes green! Very appropriate for nature’s greenest vegetable. If you can’t find that, a zingy Sauvignon Blanc would be good too.
And if you’re a beer-lover, a nice citrussy IPA should do a fine job.
We’ve come a long way from the neeps and tatties diet of the 1970s. Those staples still have their place, but that place is on our plates in the cold months of autumn and winter.
Sunny spring is definitely asparagus time.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 12th May. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.