Listen to Brenda tell the story
It’s that time of year again — asparagus time. Actually, no, it’s not that time of year, but global warming has advanced the season into what used to be winter. But you know the season has arrived when people start lining up at produce stands to buy tasteless, vaguely phallic white sticks.
Yes, white. Because somebody, somehow, somewhere convinced the German population that white asparagus tastes better than the green. The white shafts are dug out of the ground prematurely before they reach the surface and can produce chlorophyll and pesky byproducts known as “flavor” and “vitamins.” But no matter. To make the dish tasty, all you have to do is drown the steamed asparagus in creamy yellow hollandaise sauce, the same kind you use to add a few hundred calories to eggs to make them Eggs Benedict. This rich sauce also nicely balances out the fact that asparagus by itself is healthy.
I’m not just imagining that Germans consume a lot of asparagus. The country plants more of it than any other European country to the tune of 21,270 hectares or 52,600 acres in 2022.
White asparagus is not cheap, and there’s a good reason for that. You cannot drive across a field with a giant combine to harvest the asparagus the way they do in the American Midwest to make…
