French things

I just saw a New Yorker magazine article saying that the sharing the communion cup in churches might turn out to be a victim of the coronavirus pandemic. It's too dangerous for all the congregants to drink out of the same cup. I've been wonder whether, in France, the bises (cheek kisses) and the poignée de main (handshake) that French people share every time they see each other — often every day —might be victims too. Too dangerous. Unsanitary. It's a cultural earthquake is shaking French society.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned yesterday Walt went to the open-air market in Saint-Aignan Saturday morning and got us some more strawberries and some asparagus. The locally grown asparagus spears we get here are white, not green.

The grower who sold us these actually called them asperges violettes, saying the purplish tinge on the tips of the spears was given to them by brief exposure to the sun before they were picked.

Asparagus like this is grown in mounds of sand. The spears are "blanched" because they are never exposed to sunlight as they grow. They're the same plant as green asparagus, just grown differently. I don't really know why they came to be grown this way, but it's such a widespread practice and so taken for granted that none of the web pages about growing asparagus even mentions it.



The white spears on the left have been peeled with a vegetable peeler, starting an inch or two from the tip of each spear.

The sandy soil of the Loire and Cher river valleys and of the Sologne region is ideal for growing asparagus, and there are fields of them all around the area. There's not much to see, however, since the spears stay underground and are cut as soon as their tips reach the surface. All you see is a field of sand in mounds or piled up in rows.




These have been cooked by steaming after being peeled. The purple color fades when they're cooked.

There is a difference in taste between asparagus spears that are white and asparagus spears that have grown above ground and allowed to turn green. I've never done a side-by-side taste test, because we so seldom find green asparagus here. In my opinion, the white asparagus has a milder, almost sweeter taste. The green ones have a stronger, slightly metallic taste. But that's just me. I like both.

These bundles of cooked asparagus spears are wrapped in thin slice of boiled sandwich ham (called jambon de Paris in France).

In culinary terms, the main difference between white and green asparagus spears is that the white ones need to be peeled before you cook them. Use a vegetable peeler, called un couteau économe or just un économe in French. The skin on the spear is fibrous and not really edible. In preparing green asparagus, some cooks carefully trim off the little triangular leaf buds on the spears. Sometimes a little bit of sand might be lurking under the buds.

Ready to be reheated and browned in the oven...

...and, finally, ready for the table. Serve them in the baking dish — one bundle per person.

Yesterday we decided to have asparagus au gratin with ham for lunch. We cooked the spears in a steamer pot. Then we made two bundles of five or six cooked spears and wrapped each bundle in a thin slice of ham. We put them in a baking dish and covered them with a cheese sauce and some grated cheese, leaving the asparagus tips uncovered. I decided to use the ewe's milk cheese called Ossau Iraty, from Basque country, as the cheese for the dish. It tasted good.