Worthy of Versailles

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/dining/white-asparagus-frances-spring-treat.html

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MAGESCQ, France — I have come to regard it as the asparagus paradox.

How could something so revered here, such a part of the French table, of French history and culture, be met with such indifference in America?

I’m talking about white asparagus. In France, Germany and other pockets of Europe, it is not green but white asparagus, plump and shiny, that heralds the arrival of spring. In the United States, by contrast, rather than being worthy of celebration, white asparagus is just another vegetable. Most of it is skinny, dull and imported from Peru. It is so insignificant that the California Asparagus Commission and the United States Department of Agriculture do not even keep data on it.

“Americans just do not ‘get’ white asparagus,” said Steven Jenkins, a senior manager at Fairway Market in New York, which currently has it on display at its Upper West Side store. “They don’t get it as a fresh vegetable, and they surely don’t get it as a jarred or tinned cooked salad ingredient. I have nothing to offer except to say that we lose money on them.”

I am here to beg reconsideration.

The first time I set out to harvest white asparagus, I was issued a harvesting tool that looked like a long two-pronged screwdriver and told to go out into the fields and feel the “vibrations.”

I wanted to do well. I was on a day trip to a white asparagus farm not far from Paris with assorted journalists and food enthusiasts. Our host was the three-star Michelin chef Yannick Alléno. (An Internet poll had recently named him the “sexiest chef” in France.) We fanned out over a field of long sandy mounds that hid thousands of precious white stalks. I plunged the tool, known as an asparagus knife, into the earth until it hit something hard. I struggled to pull it up. The stalk snapped and broke off at three inches. Again and again it happened.

“The asparagus isn’t vibrating for me,” I told Chef Alléno as I relinquished my tool.

The cold, wet winter in France has meant that the special white variety came late to the food markets of Paris this spring. It was expensive: about $11 a pound. Because it had to be trucked all that way from the Landes in the southwest (Loire asparagus wasn’t ready), it was dull and wrinkled, a dead giveaway that it wasn’t as fresh as it should have been.

So I set out again to harvest my own, this time down to the part of the Landes not far from the Atlantic Coast and the Spanish border.

Its loose, sandy, mineral-rich soil and warm growing season produces white asparagus that since 2005 has earned it “protected geographic indication” status.

My host for this journey was Jean Coussau, the third-generation chef and owner of Relais de la Poste, the two-star Michelin restaurant and hotel in Magescq.

“It is a ritual to go hunting for the first white asparagus,” said Mr. Coussau, who grew up here. “It is the first blush of spring on the table, along with morels and suckling lamb. When you pick up a white asparagus, it is pleasant to touch. It is beautiful. There is such sensual pleasure working with it.”

The French claim to have cultivated asparagus (color uncertain) as early as the Renaissance. Louis XIV grew asparagus in his Versailles hothouses year round. Manet painted the white version with purple tips; Proust praised it in “Swann’s Way.” (“What fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world.”)

Mr. Coussau told me that white asparagus is vulnerable, in need of protection from the sun. It is pure. Unlike other white vegetables like endive or turnips that can be braised, white asparagus is best boiled until it is tender.

It is never eaten alone, but is married with a sauce (the classics are hollandaise in the north, vinaigrette in the south). And it is eaten in abundance before it disappears in June.

Harvesting is part of its mystique. That’s because asparagus has to be dug up while it is still hidden underground. As soon as the furled tips are touched by the sun, they produce chlorophyll and turn color — from mother-of-pearl ivory to lavender-rose to purple to green. Along the way, the taste gets stronger; more acidic and less sweet.

Mr. Coussau drove me to the nearby farm of Francis and Michel Lalanne, brothers who grow white asparagus on 19 acres of their 300-acre farm (the rest is used for corn for animal feed).

Three farmworkers from Ecuador moved swiftly and strategically in a field of asparagus-filled mounds. A German-made four-wheeled metal apparatus held and lifted the heavy black plastic sheeting that protected the mounds from sunlight.

Every stalk had to be coaxed from the sand by hand. I learned that the trick to successful harvesting is to bend over and thrust the long tool into the soil from the side, not from above. Then you jiggle it until it finds the center of the hard stalk and gently, firmly, lift it straight up. This requires strength (the stalks can be as much as an inch and a half in diameter) and balance. It turns out I had been attacking rather than seducing.

Asparagus can break through the soil and shoot up more than two inches overnight. The harvesters had to deal with hundreds of stalks that had dared to poke through the ground. They lopped off the tops and cast them into the gutters.

“They weren’t there yesterday,” said Francis Lalanne of the unwelcome spikes. “We’ve had too much rain. We couldn’t work the fields. And a broken tractor, too. This is a race against the clock. It’s war!”

Two other workers in rubber aprons and boots worked an assembly line in a damp warehouse with a wet floor. A machine cut the spears to a uniform 8.6 inches. Asparagus is about 90 percent water and so fragile that it has to be washed, lined up in crates filled with cold water and quickly refrigerated. Asparagus that was bent or contained color was separated out as inferior.

“What are we going to do with these?” Francis Lalanne asked. “Give them as presents? Sell them at half price? Would you want to buy them?”

Frankly, yes, I would. I broke off one of the tops of the rejects and tasted it. Tender, crunchy, more pungent than pure white, but not as strong as green. I was tempted to fill up plastic shopping bags with them, then head back to the field and pick up the asparagus tips thrown onto the ground. I wanted to slice the stalks thin, season them with olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper, and eat them on the spot.

“Why not set up a little stand for tourists and serve raw asparagus salad?” I asked.

The Lalanne brothers gave me the kind of look you give to someone who has dropped in from the big city for the day and will soon go away.

Back in Magescq with a treasure trove of white asparagus he would prepare for lunch, Mr. Coussau and I toured Relais de la Poste, a weekend refuge set in a pine forest, with a beehive, a small vineyard (the wine cellar consists of four barrels) and an orchard (including apple, cherry, fig, pear, plum, peach and wild nut trees).

In the kitchen, a team of workers peeled the tough, fibrous and bitter asparagus skin from each spear, working from the tip to the base.

For our meal, Mr. Coussau was particularly proud of the rare wild salmon — grilled — and the sea lamprey with leeks he was serving for lunch. I was more interested in his two asparagus dishes: roasted tips with a poached egg deep-fried for 20 seconds and topped with morels in a port wine sauce, and carved asparagus boats stuffed with crab and a coulis of green pea and crab.

He sent me back to Paris with two shopping bags of white asparagus. I gave some to Ezzdine Ben Abdollah, the greengrocer on the Rue des Martyrs in my neighborhood, who promised to cook them for his wife. I gave more to the guys at Le Pantruche, the hottest bistro in my neighborhood, hoping to solidify my relationship with them the next time I wanted a table. Then I headed with the rest to Restaurant Akrame, the one-star Michelin restaurant near the Arc de Triomphe.

Akrame Benallal, the 31-year-old chef, was so excited he created a dish before my eyes. He sliced some of the raw asparagus into strips as thin and flexible as angel hair pasta, and garnished it with a vinaigrette made with his own peppery Ligurian olive oil. He baked the rest upright in makeshift aluminum foil packets and served them with a cashew sauce.

“I never did this before,” he confessed. “So let’s not get too cerebral. But I know where I’m going — like life. And now we have a story to tell, no?”

Exactly.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Additional research by Emerik Derian.