At this time of year, you may find me doing one of two things. Either I will be standing in the garden, straining to see the first swifts wheeling in the sky above our house, or I’ll be swinging by the greengrocer yet again, in the hope of English asparagus. Officially, the asparagus season begins on St George’s Day, which falls on 23 April. But recent winters have been so warm, it has sometimes arrived as early as February. As I write, though, I’m still waiting: yesterday, the bunch I picked up and promptly put back down again came with a label that read “Peru”.
I don’t know if English asparagus is the best, but it is very, very delicious, and it has a long and delightful history. As Catherine Brown tells us in The Taste of Britain, until the early 17th century, in England the vegetable was an “unimproved oddity”, somewhat neglected even as it was regularly eaten. “When I see the weedy specimens of this noble plant for sale in London I never cease to wonder why no one has yet taken the trouble to improve its cultivation,” wrote Giacomo Castelveltro, the humanist and traveller, in 1614. In his native Italy, asparagus was taken a lot more seriously, by gardeners and gourmands alike. But things were about to change. Soon, London was ringed by growers, especially in Mortlake and Deptford; it was from one such garden, in Fenchurch Street, that Samuel Pepys bought “a hundred of sparrow grass” in 1667.
