by Rebecca Rupp
Just before the meal was served, the abbé suddenly crumpled to the floor in a fit of apoplexy. Fontanelle dashed to the kitchen, shouting frantically, “The whole with oil! The whole with oil!”
An almost inevitable adjunct to a feast of asparagus is funny-smelling pee. Asparagus transforms “my chamber-pot into a vase of aromatic perfume,” enthused Marcel Proust, but most of those who experience it are a lot less complimentary. Dr. Louis Lemery wrote in his Treatise of All Sorts of Foods (1702) that “Sparagrass” causes “a filthy and disagreeable Smell in the Urine.” “A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreeable Odour; and a Pill of turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in a little-known piece of Frankliniana titled “Fart Proudly,” originally sent as a snarky letter to the British Royal Society in 1781.
A common comparison of the disagreeable odor is to the smell of rotten cabbage, which as everybody knows is perfectly awful. Studies of the phenomenon are complicated, however, by the fact that not everybody produces an asparagus odor, and of those who do, not everybody can smell it. Experiments to determine which is which involve either analyzing urine samples by gas chromatography or, more subjectively, persuading volunteers to sniff pots of pee. The culprit in asparagus appears to be asparagusic acid, which in the human digestive tract is converted to a handful of noxious sulfur-heavy compounds, among them the particularly pungent methanethiol, the nose-assaulting essence in skunk spray.
Along with asparagusic acid, asparagus contains a raft of more congenial components, notably folate, fiber, potassium, and vitamins K, A, and C. It also contains a good deal of asparagine, one of the twenty amino acids that serve as the building blocks for proteins. Ten of these, including asparagine, are non-essential amino acids, meaning that our bodies can synthesize them from other compounds; another ten are essential, meaning we can’t produce them on our own, but must acquire them through eating. Asparagine was the first of the amino acids to be isolated, discovered in 1806 by French chemists Louis Nicolas Vauquelin and Pierre Jean Robiquet, who extracted it from and named it after asparagus juice.
* * *
How to Eat Asparagus
“Although asparagus may be taken in the fingers, don’t take a long drooping stalk, hold it up in the air and catch the end of it in your mouth like a fish. When the stalks are thin, it is best to cut them in half with the fork, eating the tips like all fork food; the ends may then be taken in the fingers and eaten without a dropping fountain effect! Don’t squeeze the stalks, or hold your hand below the end and let the juice run down your arm.”
Emily Post’s Etiquette, 1922
* * *
American asparagus is almost invariably green, though it is also available in an anthocyanin-laden purple and a bleached and ghostly white. White asparagus is simply green asparagus, buried. Popular in Europe for its smooth buttery taste, white asparagus is created by mounding sandy soil over the beds to shield the growing plants from direct exposure to the sun, which ordinarily induces the manufacture of chlorophyll and turns the stalks green.
Germans are so passionate about their pallid crop that during the spring asparagus season — Spargelzeit — visitors annually converge on the Asparagus Triangle in Baden-Württemberg, where the town of Schwetzingen styles itself the “Asparagus Capital of the World.” The point of Spargelzeit is, of course, to eat as much asparagus as possible, preferably at every meal, though the area also features asparagus celebrations with chosen Asparagus Queens, asparagus-peeling contests, an Asparagus Cycling Trail, and a three-story Asparagus Museum in a fifteenth-century tower in Freistaat Bayern.
The actual asparagus capital of the world these days is in Peru. The recent Peruvian asparagus boom is an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, a beefed-up and academic big brother of Murphy’s Law, which states that intervention in a complex system often leads to unanticipated and sometimes disastrous results. In this case, the complex system was the global economy, the intervention was the U.S. government’s War on Drugs, and the unanticipated consequence was the fall of American asparagus.
In the early 1990s, the American government, in an attempt to persuade Peruvian farmers to grow something other than coca — the immensely profitable raw material of cocaine — began to subsidize Peruvian asparagus. Under the tenets of the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA), passed in 1991 and renewed in 2002, Peru is allowed to export its asparagus to the United States tax-free — a financial advantage of such magnitude that American asparagus farmers, faced with it, have toppled like dominoes. Pre-ATPA imports of Peruvian asparagus totaled 4 million annual pounds; today we bring in 110 million pounds each year. It’s not clear that this vegetarian windfall has made much of a dent in the Peruvian coca industry, but American asparagus growers in the top asparagus-producing states of California, Washington, and Michigan have taken a dive.
There’s even a movie about it. In the spirit of Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger and Me, which chronicled the economic collapse of Flint, Michigan, after the closing of the General Motors auto factories, Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly’s Asparagus! traces the awful impact of governmental drug-war policies on Michigan’s rural Oceana County. Once the “Asparagus Capital of the Nation,” Oceana has traditionally made its living from asparagus, while developing an accompanying local asparagus culture, featuring an annual Asparagus Festival, an asparagus-costumed dance troupe, an asparagus comic-book hero (Super Stalk), and the world’s tallest asparagus cake.
Today not only the farmers of Oceana but hundreds of asparagus farmers nationwide have gone out of business, taking with them a distinctive way of life. Community pride and sense of identity, writes De Mare, often center around local crops. When we lose them, we lose sight of who we are.
The grassroots solution to the erosion of local food and farms is to eat locally. Local eaters now even have a name all their own — locavore — selected as the Word of the Year in 2007 by the Oxford American Dictionary. The term was coined by California local eater Jessica Prentice, cofounder of the online community Locavores, but the concept has been promulgated since the 1970s by Alice Waters, founder of Berkeley’s famous Chez Panisse restaurant. Waters’s passionate support of organic, locally grown, and seasonally appropriate food has changed the nature of American eating — although, admittedly, local eating calls for more ingenuity and self-sacrifice in some places than in others. Where we live in northern Vermont, for example, local eating in February means last summer’s canned tomatoes and the hope that maybe the cat will catch a squirrel.
Still, today more and more people are tackling “100-mile diets,” from the book of the same name (The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating) by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon of Vancouver, British Columbia. The couple, who began their local-eating project on the first day of spring in 2005, resolved to eat nothing that could not be obtained within a 100-mile radius of home.
Still, the most environmentally friendly local eating undeniably comes from one’s own backyard. Which is why, this season, I’m going to dig an asparagus trench.
CHAPTER TWO
In Which
BEANS
BEAT BACK
THE DARK AGES
plus
An Old Testament Swindle,
A Pythagorean Dilemma, Siege Stew,
Boston’s Sunday Dinner,
A Soupçon of Cyanide,
and A Pressing Social Problem
I was determined to know beans.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
In the late nineteenth century, an enterprising American distributor marketed his green beans as “the Ninth Wonder of the World.” It’s not certain how this appealing slogan affected the case-hardened American consumer, but it did catch the jealous eye of P. T. Barnum, who claimed that he had coined the term himself to describe such phenomena as General Tom Thumb, the Feejee Mermaid, Jumbo the Elephant, and Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins. Barnum sued and beat the bean, w
hich subsequently qualified its Wonder status by adding a cautious “of Food” in smaller print.
The wondrous bean that figured in this legal brouhaha was Phaseolus vulgaris, the so-called American, French, kidney, or common green bean. P. vulgaris has been cultivated for thousands of years, perhaps originally domesticated from a wild ancestor resembling the uncivilized-sounding P. aborigineus, native to Argentina and Brazil. Bean seeds from archaeological sites in Peru and Mexico have been radiocarbon-dated respectively to 8000 and 5000 BCE, and by the time of the Spanish conquest, Montezuma was taking in 5,000 tons of beans a year in tribute from his devoted subjects.
Columbus noticed the American beans (“very different from those of Spain”) in Cuba on his first voyage to the New World. Giovanni da Verrazano, flushed with success after his North American voyage of 1524, described the Indian beans as “of good and pleasant taste;” Samuel de Champlain, in his 1605 account of the Indians of the Kennebec region in Maine, mentioned their cultivation of “Brazilian beans” in different colors, three or four of which were planted in each hill of corn to grow up the supporting cornstalk. Thomas Hariot mentioned beans (in two sizes) grown by the Indians on Roanoke Island, and John Smith and Powhatan went on record as sharing a macho meal of beans and brandy in the early days of the settlement at Jamestown.
Beans, for the Indians of eastern North America, were relatively new. According to Bruce D. Smith, archaeobiologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Eastern woodlands tribes had established themselves as farmers by 2000 BCE, and had domesticated a handful of promising local plants, among them squash (crooknecks and pattypans), sunflowers, lamb’s-quarters (Chenopodium berlandieri), and marsh elder (Iva annua).
Of the traditional “three sisters” — squash, corn, and beans, which, as every schoolchild knows, were the principal crops of the American Indians — squash, in the northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, was for some two millennia an only child. Beans and corn were laggardly imports from Mexico, slowly moving their way from vegetable patch to vegetable patch across the country and up the Eastern seaboard. Corn is believed to have made it to the eastern United States by 200 CE; beans arrived somewhat later. In both cases, it was another 600 years or more before cultivation really took off. If Leif Erikson, scudding along the North American coast in year 1000, had looked farther south or farther inland, he might have found farmers growing squash. He might not yet have found beans.
It seems to have been the Spanish who brought the American bean to Europe, sometime in the sixteenth century, where it was grown as an ornamental — which isn’t surprising. Bean flowers are gorgeous, described in the botanical literature as “papilionaceous,” because their petals look like butterfly wings. One story claims that the introduction of the American bean to European cuisine was sheer serendipity: at some point, a bunch of neglected pods accidentally toppled from an ornamental vine into a peculiarly placed soup pot, where they remained long enough to be cooked and eaten. This seems unlikely, since the American beans — though admittedly a little funny-looking to the novice — were readily recognizable as beans, and the Old World was used to beans. It had been living with beans for ten thousand years.
Beans are legumes, members of the family Fabaceae — the third largest of the families of flowering plants (after the Orchid and Daisy families), and the second most important to the human diet after Poaceae, the grasses. Fabaceae contains more than 600 genera and nearly 19,000 species, an unwieldy batch of friends and relations that includes beans, peas, lentils, and soybeans, carob and tamarind trees, and alfalfa, kudzu, licorice, jicama, and peanuts.
Gardenwise, the oldest of the bunch may be the lentil (Lens culinaris), whose name comes from the contact-lens-like shape of the dried bean. Lentils, along with barley and einkorn wheat, were among the first plants domesticated some 10,000 years ago in western Asia’s lush Fertile Crescent, a vaguely boomerang-shaped swath of territory between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf.
Lentils, along with barley and einkorn wheat, were among the first plants domesticated some 10,000 years ago in western Asia’s lush Fertile Crescent.
The Sumerians grew them, and the oldest known legume recipe — found in a trio of Babylonian culinary cuneiform tablets dated to 1700–1600 BCE — is for a porridge of lentils, simmered in beer. Remains of lentil dinners have been found in Bronze Age Swiss lake dwellings, and lentils are featured in the most egregious example of shysterism in the Old Testament, when the cagey Jacob talks his older twin brother Esau into trading his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup.
Almost as old is the Old World’s only cultivated bean, the fava or broad bean (Vicia faba), to which Pliny the Elder awarded “the highest place of honor” among leguminous plants. Domesticated in the late Neolithic period, the fava probably originated somewhere in the Mediterranean region or Near East, though its wild progenitor is apparently now extinct. Favas have been found in Egyptian tombs and in the ruins of Troy, and in the Old Testament, Ezekiel ate them between prophecies. The Greeks used fava beans as voting tokens in magisterial elections, a custom later remarked upon by Plutarch, who claimed that the proverbial dictum “Abstain from beans” had nothing to do with diet, but meant keep out of politics.
Among the rules adhered to by the vegetarian followers of Pythagoras, whose quasireligious sect settled in Croton on the coast of southern Italy by 530 BCE, were strictures that forbade stirring fires with iron pokers or eating meat, fish, or beans. The bean ban is usually attributed to the Pythagoreans’ belief in the transmigration of souls, in which human beings could not only be reborn as animals, but — just possibly — as beans. Certainly it wasn’t worth taking the chance: eating a bean, according to Pythagoras, was like biting off the head of one’s mother.
Alternatively the Pythagorean avoidance of beans may have had its roots in the genetic disease known as favism. Particularly common in individuals of Mediterranean ancestry, favism results from a deficiency in the enzyme glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD). The deficiency, carried on the X chromosome, renders the red blood cells of unlucky males and homozygous females sensitive to hemolysis (breakdown) by the oxidants found in fava beans. Fava bean consumption, or even a stroll through the field when the bean plants are in flower, brings on a severe allergic-type reaction, and in extreme cases rapid hemolytic anemia, shock, and death. Beans, in other words, may have made Pythagoras so sick that he simply didn’t want them anywhere near him.
Political meddling — Plutarch’s forbidden indulgence in beans — eventually led to Pythagoras’s downfall. The unpopular Pythagoreans were shunned, persecuted, and eventually driven from Croton. One story holds that beans ultimately brought about Pythagoras’s death. Trapped while on the run, he refused the only available means of escape, which involved trampling through a bean field, and so was captured and killed by his enemies.
Despite this awful warning, Pythagoras’s banned bean was a prime edible of the Middle Ages. Italian scholar and author Umberto Eco, in fact, hypothesizes that Europeans emerged from the so-called Dark Ages — the bleak and impoverished period extending from the fall of Rome to the end of the first millennium — because of the fava bean. His essay, “How the Bean Saved Civilization,” appeared in a special issue of the New York Times Magazine on the theme of the best inventions of the past one thousand years.
The evidence for the redemptive role of the bean comes from babies. Though numerical estimates vary, it’s clear that a population boom began as Europe entered the tenth century. In the seventh century — possibly the nadir of the miserable Dark Ages — the population of Europe had sunk to a hungry and disease-ridden 14 million. By the year 1000, however, it had more than doubled; by the fourteenth century, it had doubled — even tripled — again. Eco argues that the upswing in population size, energy, intellect, and the economy all derived from a new crop. It was in the tenth century that Europeans began the widespread cultivation of beans.
> Legume comes from the Latin verb legere, meaning “to gather,” and when it comes to gathering, legumes — such as beans and peas — are well worth the effort. Nicknamed “the poor man’s meat,” beans and peas contain 17 to 25 percent protein, two to three times that found in cereal crops. The influx of protein into the previously parsimonious Dark Age diet made for stronger, healthier people, who lived longer and had more children. The quality of daily life improved, countries grew richer, and the expanding and better-fed population was able to support the specialization of labor, the growth of cities, the burgeoning of the arts, the emergence of science, and the launching of ships to the New World.
Furthermore, the benefits of beans lie not just in beans as food, but in the baggage the growing bean brings with it.
Leguminous plants are distinguished by their ability to fix nitrogen — that is, to convert atmospheric nitrogen to a form in which it can be used by plants and animals to synthesize such life-essential molecules as DNA, RNA, and proteins. (See box.)
Medieval beans were such an essential article of diet that the penalty for robbing a beanfield was death. In England, ghosts were said to fear broad beans — to banish specters, one spat beans at them — and those same beans, roasted, were believed efficacious in the treatment of toothache and smallpox.
