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Wild Asparagus


Jinmyo

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I love French wild asparagus. They are to North American asparagus as haricots verts are to green beans.

I have had the hreat good fortune of obtaining a flat of them this morning so for lunch:

Wild asparagus just warmed in lobster butter (butter I keep from butter-poaching lobster tails) on soft risotto Milanese; smoked chicken meat and morels; sauteed ramps with lardons of double-smoked bacon.

"I've caught you Richardson, stuffing spit-backs in your vile maw. 'Let tomorrow's omelets go empty,' is that your fucking attitude?" -E. B. Farnum

"Behold, I teach you the ubermunch. The ubermunch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the ubermunch shall be the meaning of the earth!" -Fritzy N.

"It's okay to like celery more than yogurt, but it's not okay to think that batter is yogurt."

Serving fine and fresh gratuitous comments since Oct 5 2001, 09:53 PM

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The key to finding asparagus is to look for it now, when the fronds are up and waving in the breeze. They look like feathery Christmas trees, about 3 or 4 feet high, and soon will have little bright red berries on them.

Make yourself a little map marking all the places you have seen them. Then, come next spring (early April here) go hunting. Learn to recognize the dried stalks and investigate at the bases of the plants.

It grows almost everywhere, along the roadsides and in the fence rows.

I must have eaten 50 pounds of wild asparagus from my little hill this spring. I only gave up looking for it when the poison ivy got too tall.

sparrowgrass
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I bought some wild asparagus at the Union Square greenmarket on Wednesday. . It was very thin and although I always peel cultivated asparagus this certainly did not need peeling . I just brushed it with olive oil and put it in a 500° oven for about four minutes. It was superb.

Ruth Friedman

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Thanks for the link. I have heard of this before but didn't really know what it looked like. Does anyone know where it grows in th US? Is it only found in cooler climates?

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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I bought some wild asparagus at the Union Square greenmarket on Wednesday. . It was very thin and although I always peel cultivated asparagus this certainly did not need peeling . I just brushed it with olive oil and put it in a 500° oven for about four minutes. It was superb.

Ruth, really. Just try warming it in some oil or butter so it has all of its herbaceous flavours and crunch.

"I've caught you Richardson, stuffing spit-backs in your vile maw. 'Let tomorrow's omelets go empty,' is that your fucking attitude?" -E. B. Farnum

"Behold, I teach you the ubermunch. The ubermunch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the ubermunch shall be the meaning of the earth!" -Fritzy N.

"It's okay to like celery more than yogurt, but it's not okay to think that batter is yogurt."

Serving fine and fresh gratuitous comments since Oct 5 2001, 09:53 PM

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Now I am embarrassed--I should look at the link before I shoot my mouth off. The vegetable in the link is not closely related to the wild asparagus of the US--common names will get you in trouble every time.

From the latin name, it seems the vegetable they are talking about grows from a bulb, and is related to the star of bethlehem flowers that are a weed species in the Midwestern US.

Sorry, my bad.

sparrowgrass
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If you want this kind of "wild asparagus" you can go to West Virginia, apparently.

www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/cgi/b98_map?genus=Ornithogalum&species=pyrenaicum

Star of Bethlehem

Botanical: Ornithogalum umbellatum (LINN.)

Family: N.O. Liliaceae

Other Species

---Synonyms---Bath Asparagus. Dove's Dung. Star of Hungary. White Filde Onyon.

---Part Used---Bulb.

The Star of Bethlehem is a bulbous plant nearly allied to the Onion and Garlic.

The leaves are long and narrow and darkgreen; the flowers, in bloom during April and May, are a brilliant white internally, but with the petals striped with green outside. They expand only in the sunshine.

Though there are numerous species in this genus, only one is truly native to Great Britain, the spiked Ornithogalum, O. pyrenaicum (Linn.), and is not common, being a local plant, found only in a few counties. It is abundant, however, in woods near Bath, and the unexpanded inflorescence used to be collected and sold in that town under the name of 'Bath Asparagus,' and was cooked and served as a vegetable.

sparrowgrass
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This weekend I cooked with the wild green French asp., the baby white, and that fucking nasty ass sea asp. To me it was nothing special, a rather bland countenance of it's larger self. It looked cool though, all three asparagus sitting underneath a perfectly cooked filet. I'm not one to use baby veggies and all that kind of stuff. Fru fru fuck you.

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OK... I googled also. Apparantly this stuff only grows in West Virginia like sparrowgrass said. So... Where are providers getting enough of this stuff to sell? Is it starting to be grown commercially?

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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Are they importing it from England/Europe? Not that it makes any difference to me--I would probably have to drive to St. Louis or Chicago to find anything so exotic. I am lucky if I can find avocados or mangos in my grocery store.

(But I don't care--I have real asparagus growing right outside. Neener-neener.)

sparrowgrass
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:raz::raz::raz::raz::raz::raz:

Linda LaRose aka "fifi"

"Having spent most of my life searching for truth in the excitement of science, I am now in search of the perfectly seared foie gras without any sweet glop." Linda LaRose

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  • 3 years later...
Are they importing it from England/Europe? Not that it makes any difference to me--I would probably have to drive to St. Louis or Chicago to find anything so exotic.  I am lucky if I can find avocados or mangos in my grocery store. 

(But I don't care--I have real asparagus growing right outside.  Neener-neener.)

I believe that wild asparagus is now grown here in the States - according to this source, it was first brought over in the 18th Century.

I LOVE wild asparagus...I eat it at home, mainly in a spaghetti dish, but also had it on a recent trip to Per Se, where it was served with butter-poached lobster and morels. Quite divine.

I made my pasta dish for dinner last night... :smile:

"We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air." - Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Queenie Takes Manhattan

eG Foodblogs: 2006 - 2007

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OK... I googled also. Apparantly this stuff only grows in West Virginia like sparrowgrass said. So... Where are providers getting enough of this stuff to sell? Is it starting to be grown commercially?

My questions, exactly! Our farmers markets in D.C. have a number of venders from W. Virginia, so I wonder.

Meg, your dish looks beautiful and the asparagus, just like the Italian.

Pan: some folk are trying to cultivate ramps--especially given laws against picking wild ramps in federal parks. (Your question also applies to wild rice since much of what is sold as wild rice isn't wild at all. I guess common-use labels are retained for plants we eat, though concern about sustainability attaches the word "wild" to fish to distinguish the wares of certain fishmongers from farmed seafood.) Regarding Latin names to help distinguish the different types of asparagus from one another, this somewhat familiar-sounding blogger offers a brief narrative account while there is also this mind-blowing list.

Edited by Pontormo (log)

"Viciousness in the kitchen.

The potatoes hiss." --Sylvia Plath

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My grandparents always grew the "wild" asparagus here in New York, and there were only a few weeks that it was good before it went to seed and they sprayed the shit out of it for pests. I have since heard it can be cultivated more organically, at least my mom mentioned her friend does so. It's far superior to the "wild" stuff I have found in markets, because it is usually starting to seed. You can find it growing in the wild here on occasion, usually in small patches, and there is one patch that has been coming up for years, but I haven't ever been that motivated enough to get to it before it shows itself.

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You mean they're cultivating wild asparagus? Wouldn't that make it no longer wild?

I was thinking the same thing...wild is no longer so much a truth as it is a truthiness - a way to distinguish from other kinds of asparagus...

"We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air." - Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Queenie Takes Manhattan

eG Foodblogs: 2006 - 2007

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Hi,

We are seeing wild asparagus from France in a local restaurant. It looks nothing like any asparagus I have ever seen. It has a long very thin (1/8") stem with a very small head. It is very mild...

Tim

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Add PA, NJ, DEL, MD, VA to the list. We used to pick asparagus by the roadside there but in the old days we had to be carful tyo stay away from busy roads or the car exhaust would leave lead on the staulks.

Euell Gibbons book Stalking the Wild Asparagus is a great guide to wild foods.

We also used to eat poke, cattails shoots, other roadside stuff.

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Add CO as well. I've been driving a new way home from work and have seen a lot of mature plants. I was thinking I would try to pick some next Spring, but then I wondered if the fact that they're growing so close to a pretty busy road is a bad thing. Do you think the quality and flavor would be hurt by car exhaust?

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Add CO as well. I've been driving a new way home from work and have seen a lot of mature plants. I was thinking I would try to pick some next Spring, but then I wondered if the fact that they're growing so close to a pretty busy road is a bad thing. Do you think the quality and flavor would be hurt by car exhaust?

Absolutely, 50 ft. is my rule or ten ft. higher than or some measure in between with a greater emphasis on distance from the road. And what would you classify as busy? Multiple lanes? I can't really say I would pick anything anywhere close to that kind of busy. If you can taste the difference it's probably already too late.

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