During spring vacation, I went on a hike with my children through the hills around my mother’s house near Jerusalem. We took with us a little picnic: cucumber and pepper sticks, pomelo segments, pitas spread with the Laughing Cow cheese, which I have deliberately kept them in the dark about for years in hope that they first get hooked on more “sophisticated” cheeses. As I feared, the cow was a hit, quickly leading their league of favorites (sorry, Parmigiano-Reggiano, feta and the most recent titleholder, Cheddar).
Recipe: Charred Asparagus Lettuce Cups
Despite my small disappointment, it was a moment of rare intimacy, one I wanted to treasure. So when my 9-year-old, after an hour of generously handing out superpowers, claimed to have the power to give me any device I could imagine, I asked for a machine that could take me right back to my favorite times. I imagined something like a personalized playlist or my children’s cheese league — a catalog of my Top 100 moments — where I could be seamlessly transported.
My wish was granted, no problem.
But it led me to deeper thoughts about the things we do to try to control the one uncontrollable thing: time.
Scrolling while in line (must not waste 30 seconds). Setting timers for cooking, for resting, for watering plants. Speeding up podcasts to absorb more in less time. Snoozing alarms and haggling for minutes. Pushing clocks forward and back, negotiating with daylight. Prepping the night before (clothes out, lunch made) for the next day’s rush. Time, always slipping away, always needing to be captured, allocated, spent wisely.
In truth, we can’t really bargain with time (unless you’re a child with a busy imagination, that is). Some of the things we do may help a little — the timers, calendars, reminders and lists — but it’s just tinkering. In reality, we are facing something way bigger than us: nature itself, whose cycles can reduce all human efforts to near nothingness as they quietly proceed according to their own calendar.
Michael Pollan talks of this tension in “The Botany of Desire,” flipping our conventional understanding of domestication on its head. “We don’t give nearly enough credit to plants,” he writes. “They’ve been working on us — they’ve been using us for their own purposes.” We think we’ve cultivated plants to serve our needs, but really, they’ve been cultivating us, evolving qualities that appeal to our desires to ensure their survival.
In “Second Nature,” he goes further, writing that “the garden might be a place where we can meet nature halfway,” rather than impose our demands. This is what I think about when I think about asparagus, in particular British asparagus, with its very short season. A plant with its own clock.
The Romans struggled with asparagus’s transient nature. They were so determined to control it that they created what they called the Asparagus Fleet, ships tasked with rushing the vegetable from distant provinces to Rome. An entire imperial logistics system was devoted to a vegetable, all because the mighty Roman Empire couldn’t even extend its shelf life by a single day.
We’re still in essentially the same position, 2,000 years later. We’ve built greenhouses, perfected logistics chains and invented storage methods that can keep an apple fresh for a year. Yet asparagus still defeats us. Yes, we can fly it in from Peru or force it in hothouses, but it’s never quite the same as those first local stalks, with their particular crispness and subtle yet somehow mind-blowing flavor.
Spring food in general is just not reliable in the way winter roots are. It’s beautiful — vibrant greens, tender shoots pushing through soil — but it isn’t built to last. You can’t stockpile spring like winter squash. You can’t return to it next week when your schedule finally clears. Wild garlic, which is growing in my garden right now, wilts as I gather it. Asparagus is nearly as ephemeral. And so, like the Romans, I adjust my life around asparagus’s timeline, instead of trying in vain to do it the other way around.
Also when cooking asparagus, I take a leaf out of the Romans’ book. Emperor Augustus is said to have coined the phrase “velocius quam asparagi coquantur” — “faster than asparagus is cooked” — to describe something done very quickly. Wise Augustus captured what all cooks, lucky enough to have a fresh bunch of bright green spears fall in their lap, should know: Time is of the essence! The urgency applied in getting those green spears to you is equally vital when cooking them. Go too long, and all your efforts will be wasted.
I like steaming my asparagus when I serve it warm. The gentle heat is less likely to overcook the spears. For salads, I mostly boil them briefly, then refresh them under cold water as soon as they’re tender. The spears in my Asparagus Fleet today, however, are actually lightly grilled. I don’t mind losing some tender texture for concentrated flavor, because you get a nice crisp bite from spring’s fresh lettuce leaves.
Whichever way you choose, be mindful and gentle, and make sure you keep track of time. Asparagus, you see, doesn’t come twice.
I adjust my life around asparagus’s timeline.
Yotam Ottolenghi is a writer and the chef-owner of the Ottolenghi restaurants, Nopi and Rovi, in London. He is an Eat columnist for The New York Times Magazine and writes a weekly column for The Guardian’s Feast Magazine.
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