Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [16]
From the outlaw harvests of my childhood, I’ve measured my years by asparagus. I sweated to dig it into countless yards I was destined to leave behind, for no better reason than that I believe in vegetables in general, and this one in particular. Gardeners are widely known and mocked for this sort of fanaticism. But other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely. If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then wait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who’s to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?
The asparagus plant’s life history sets it apart, giving it a special edge as the year’s first major edible. It’s known botanically as a perennial, with a life span of many years. The rest of our plant foods are almost always the leaves, flowers, fruits, or seeds of plants that begin life in spring as seedlings and perish just a few months later when they’re frozen by autumn, or eaten, whichever comes first. (The exceptions are the fruits we call “fruits,” which grow on berry bushes or trees, and root crops, which operate a bit differently; more about these later.) Annuals tend to grow more quickly than perennials and have been cultivated as food crops for thousands of years. The grass family (whose seed heads are our grains) is especially speedy, with corn the clear winner in the carbon-fixing efficiency race. But asparagus wins the vegetable prize for living longer than one year. That’s why it is the very first one to leap up in springtime, offering edible biomass when other vegetables are still at the seedling stage; it had a head start.
The plant’s edible portion, however, is direly short-lived. The moment the asparagus neck goes under the knife, an internal starting gun fires “Go!” and it begins to decompose, metabolizing its own sugars and trying—because it knows no other plan—to keep growing. It’s best eaten the day it is cut, period. When transported, even as refrigerated cargo, the plant’s tight bud scales loosen and start to reveal the embryonic arms that were meant to become branches. The fresh stems have the tight, shiny sex appeal of dressed-up matrons on the dance floor of a Latin social club, but they lose their shine and crispness so quickly when the song is over. The sweetness goes starchy.
We don’t even know all the things that go wrong in the swan song of a vegetable, since flavor and nutritional value both result from complex interactions of living phytochemical systems. Early in the twentieth century, Japanese food scientist Kikunae Ikeda first documented that asparagus had a flavor that lay outside the range of the four well-known tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Its distinctive tang derives from glutamic acid, which Dr. Ikeda named “the fifth taste,” or umami. This was, for once, the genuine discovery of a taste sensation. (Later came the invention of an artificial umami flavoring known as monosodium glutamate.) But the flavor chemicals quickly lose their subtlety. Asparagus that’s not fresh tastes simple or even bitter, especially when overcooked.
Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let’s face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there’s a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it’s inferior. Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father’s Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears. The French make a similar party out of the release of each year’s Beaujolais; the Italians crawl over their woods like harvester ants in the autumn mushroom season, and go gaga over the summer’s first tomato.
Waiting for foods to come into season means tasting them when they’re good, but waiting is also part of most value