Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (5 page)

L
ast spring, I ate asparagus every day for two months. I turned into a superhero of asparagus.

In my secret life, I was the
Spargelfrau.
Perhaps it wasn’t the right name for a superhero. I got it from an article a friend sent me about asparagus season in Germany, which happens there at roughly the same time it happens in Michigan—May through June. The article said some German villagers get so excited about their asparagus, they eat it every day while the season lasts.

The
Spargelfrau,
I think, is actually supposed to be the woman who
sells
asparagus, not the one who buys it all up and eats it. (It strikes me now that
Spargelfrau
could mean
wife of asparagus.
I don’t know if domestic union with a vegetable merits a pair of Underoos.)

In some famous little asparagus town in Germany, there is a statue of the
über-Spargelfrau,
fat cheeked and grinning, a sort of wholesome vixen. She has a cart on wheels. She is holding armfuls of bronze asparagus.

Surrounded by bushels of real greens in an open market, the
Spargelfrau
makes a charming newspaper photograph. But I picture her there, in the town square in winter, covered in snow, holding that dead, cold asparagus out to nobody. Poor
Spargelfrau.
In real life, asparagus heroism is temporary. It is intense. There is a great deal of asparagus all at once. The hero must ingest this—raw! steamed! roasted! grilled!—and then, abruptly, stop. There are no memorials. By July the heroism must be forgotten in an orgy of peppers, summer squashes, pole beans. Nowhere in the world should there be asparagus in winter.

The winter in Michigan is long, dark, and damp. There are three things you can get fresh here year-round: beef, bread, and beer. Everything else comes from far away. Everything else, in winter, comes from a Sysco truck, along with millions of Styrofoam coffee cups. If we lived close to the land, Neander-Michiganders, we would hoard potatoes. As it is, we import vegetables, pulpy and withered.

But who needs them? The weather, perhaps like winter somewhere in Germany, makes you
want
nothing but beef and beer. If you know what you are doing in a Michigan winter, you will greet depression with depressants. Pad your dying soul with flesh. Give up and get fat. Hibernate. In the impossible spring, your cheeks will be round enough for the right
spargel
grin. A grin worthy of the triumph of cathedral tips breaking through the ground:
the asparagus is here!

The asparagus is
all
that’s here, in the farmers’ market in May, aside from a few stalks of rhubarb. We are still wobbly on our indoor legs. Under our eyes are deep circles of leftover winter despair. We have been waiting so long for a vegetable or fruit. The spring equinox back in March was irrelevant, cruelly crafted for a lower latitude. We started thinking of strawberries when we saw the first crocuses killed by frost, but that was a pipe dream. The strawberries still aren’t quite ripe—but when they are, they will be dark and concentrated, almost as if they’ve had to furrow their brows.

Michigan is a place, for me, of two firsts: living alone—well,
this
alone—and depending heavily—
this
heavily—on the seasons. Before I moved here, I couldn’t avoid the fact that I lived in an international pleasure dome—New York City.

I shopped at the Greenmarkets as much as I could. I kept up with the slight seasonal differences between Jersey tomatoes and upstaters, and distrusted calendar-defying hydroponics. Often, especially at Union Square, there was overwhelming bounty. I always liked a tiny Greenmarket for providing a challenge or imperative:
oh, it’s only the tomatillo people today.
Given the overdose of choice in the global-capitalist world, I normally have a hard time deciding what to cook. But here—tomatillos. I would have to make salsa. On assignment.

The dawning and dwindling ends of the growing season are also good for imposing menus. There might be only radishes and arugula in the early spring. In fall there are nothing but oven fillers: long-cooking squashes and apples that eventually give way to warty gourds and Christmas wreaths.

But even though there are real farms and farmers in the regions around the city, New York defies reliance on the season. When pickings were slim in the winters I lived there, I just bought pineapples and papayas at the Korean deli. I could get these at midnight if I wanted to. The growing seasons of the rest of the world were ours. Eating local in New York City can mean eating mung-bean sprouts that have arrived from somewhere far away via Chinatown, or fishing a cake of tofu out of your local deli’s tofu water.

Of course there are supermarkets where I live now. I buy bananas. I buy lemongrass and cilantro. I don’t stop myself from trying (usually failing) to get a good fig, even if you can’t grow one anywhere near here.

But, partly because I don’t have a car, the easiest and most satisfying place for me to shop is at the farmers’ market. I can walk there. And in summer, the Michigan crops—cherries, corn, eggplants, leafy greens, tomatoes, blueberries, apricots, squashes—are miraculous. In late fall, though, I fail to make the shift to the supermarket, with its Chilean grapes, its Texan greens. I keep going to the farmers’ market even when there is almost no food. From November through April, I wander under the corrugated shed roof, along the walkways where farmers huddle by portable heaters on Saturday mornings to sell apple fritters and cider. We greet each other with mutual suspicion—
what are you doing out here?
In our eyes is a lean and hungry vegetable craving. In our cheeks is apple doughnut, our serving of fruit and fiber and happiness for the day.

So, even if you don’t like asparagus, you can understand the thrill of seeing those bundles of slim stalks standing upright on the tables early one Saturday morning. It’s still chilly out. Maybe you haven’t had your first cup of coffee. But the asparagus tips sparkle, in your green-starved eyes, like jewels. Their live green is more alluring than money.
1

The only reason you don’t like asparagus is that you have eaten it in the winter. You have eaten it cooked to olive green. The stalks were fat and woody. In your mouth, an inner slime spurted out of an unchewable skin. Some of this skin you removed from between your teeth like dental floss.

The real spring asparagus is picked at dawn, if you are very lucky, and driven here in just thirty minutes in crates. Take the most slender stalk from the rubber band. You can bend it into a full arc, but still snap it crisply just above the base. The tip is like a baby’s ear, sheathed in the slightest fuzz. The stem is luminous with moisture, as if it might ooze a drop from its center. Eat it raw, right away, first thing in the morning. There is only a hint of astringency left on your teeth.

The asparagus superhero feels, at this moment, that she could eat all her asparagus raw for the rest of the spring. But there is going to be a lot to eat. Eventually, so as not to go crazy (though she wears an aura of craziness already; though the craziness is part of the wonder of spring), she will have to diversify. She will have to find recipes.

Shopping for one at the farmers’ market, especially as the season goes on and the vegetables multiply, can be a challenge. Farmers want to get rid of a lot in a little time. They’ll be packing up by two o’clock. They’ll give you a bargain if you take two for five, or three for eight. They’ll make a baker’s dozen. They’ll sell a peck. They grew this for you. They don’t come here every day. How can you insult them by trying to buy single servings? The bounty of the land does not come in single servings.

At the farmers’ market, I shop for a whole family. I live and cook alone.

The
Spargelfrau
comes home with enough asparagus to feed a sumo wrestler. On no day of the week will she be so ungrateful as to leave it off the menu. She wraps the bottoms of the stalks in a wet paper towel to keep them springy in the refrigerator.

The spring of superheroism really took off when I went with Rodger, the chef at a local restaurant—where I also worked—to pick asparagus. He was trying to establish relationships with farmers so that he could gradually shift the restaurant to local, and when possible organic, produce. One of his main sources for asparagus was the field of a dirt farmer who let the community come and harvest his asparagus crop—it was an old field that wasn’t worth his efforts, in comparison to selling dirt. So Rodger took crews of his friends and restaurant staff to pick enough to serve hundreds of people. Rodger counted the number of boxes we had filled with asparagus and left some money in a coffee can behind the barn.

Asparagus grows on a complex root system. It is difficult to plant, easy to harvest. The stalks stick up from the ground and snap off in your fingers right where they should, at the end of tenderness. We should have been there in the morning, when dew clings to the plants, but we didn’t make it there until the far side of noon. The day had turned sunny and parched. The sun, somehow, made the stalks hard to see, playing tricks as it does on a highway mirage. The field appeared to be almost empty. Others had been there to pick only a couple days before, but there was still a deceptive amount of asparagus in the field, standing upright, unprotected. We worked along the rows, stooping, snapping, making piles. After a while, the process turned hallucinatory in the bright sun—one moment I couldn’t see any asparagus; then, suddenly, I could see
nothing but
asparagus.

“Have you eaten any yet?” Rodger called from his row. I had been too reverential, attempting some kind of professionalism. I bit into a stalk. It was sweet and delicate and clear.

My one day of contact with the vegetable at its source drew me deeper into its thrall. What is the opposite of kryptonite? I was fueled to almost dangerous levels by the green stuff. Or—is Popeye a superhero?—maybe this vegetable was my special spinach, without the can. My next few meals were made of asparagus I had picked myself. But it was clear that as long as
anyone
was still out there picking, I’d go on eating asparagus.

Steaming is next up from raw on the ladder of asparagus evolution. Some people buy tall, awkward steamers just for asparagus. The stalks stand upright in a perforated cylinder, steaming from the bottoms up so that each piece is evenly cooked. Even though I was about to eat asparagus every single day for two months, I did not want one of these things. What would I do with such an implement for the rest of the year? It would taunt me like a fondue pot. I don’t mind the variations in tenderness that mishmashed steaming can produce. I just leave the bottoms a little raw if need be, or, if I’m making something with broken asparagus, throw the tips in the pot a little later than the stems. The delight of asparagus from the market is that you’ll never get a bundle of such uniform thickness that you could cook it quite all the same anyway.

Tender, local spring asparagus cooks in a couple of minutes. The danger of steaming asparagus is letting it get too watery to hold on to its sauce—sometimes the butter slides off, the lemon dilutes. Steamed asparagus can sink into a puddle on the plate. It seems to me that it might be more useful, though I have never tried it, to have an upright serving dish than an upright steamer, so that the asparagus can continue to drip dry at the table. Then you could take a piece at a time with your fingers (like toast from one of those English toast racks, which seem to exist only to make the toast cold), dip it in a dish of salt or a cup of melted butter, or rub it along your lemon wedge.

Asparagus is finger food. When I eat at home alone, almost everything is finger food. But even if you are in company, my great-aunt Lonnie assures me that the only polite way to eat asparagus is to pick it up.
2
Have you ever tried to fork a whole stem, and then, if you succeed, to aim the asparagus tip at your mouth while your tines are stuck in the base, six inches or so away? It’s a game of depth perception. The stalk dangles, dodges, then smacks you in the face. And unless you are eating with a steak knife, nothing cuts into a stalk of asparagus as well as your teeth do. A regular dinner knife just bruises it.

I sat with Aunt Lonnie at a luncheon where we had to hold our plates on our laps, perched on the edge of a sofa. There was no way to saw at the food on our knees, but Aunt Lonnie said she would have picked up the asparagus no matter where she was sitting. “Go ahead,” said Lonnie as my sister and I hesitated. Despite her benediction, there was something sneaky about eating with our hands in society. And Lonnie, ninety-some years old, giggled a little as we all bit into our stems.

The single person, if he is concerned, as I am, about plowing through his leftovers to avoid confrontations with rotten produce, must create multiple variations on the single ingredient, or repeat themes. A head of lettuce or a bell pepper stretches beyond one meal. A loaf of bread lasts from sandwich to toast to French toast to croutons. After the first night’s meal, the bundle of asparagus still stands, a small army in the fridge.

After steaming comes roasting.
3
Roasted asparagus is a triumph, because you can sort of caramelize—I think that is what is happening—whatever vegetable sugars are in there. The tips turn brown and sweet like chicken wings. You cut the slipperiness. You can seal in the salt and pepper and olive oil while the asparagus cooks, so you won’t need the sauce that was sliding off before. The skin crinkles a little, like a grilled rather than a boiled hot dog—without all the liquid, the flavor is intense.