What to Eat: Food that’s good for your health, pocket and plate. Joanna Blythman

on a glut and have exhausted the familiar treatments, it might be time to go for a more gutsy approach and serve your asparagus with a salsa verde (see Things to do with herbs), punchy with anchovies and mint.

      • Use thin sprue asparagus, lightly cooked, in a salad, with crispy lardons of bacon, soft-boiled egg and fried croutons.

      • Thick and medium spears, simply steamed, deserve the effort of an hollandaise or beurre blanc sauce.

      • A quick, weekday asparagus risotto feels like a weekend treat and is a good way to use cheaper, less regularly shaped spears and stems.

      • Delicate pale green asparagus soup, made with stems and topped with a drizzle of cream and a couple of tender tips, is one of the classiest soups. You’ll want to sieve it if your stems are a bit woody.

      Is asparagus good for me?

      Asparagus is packed with beneficial micronutrients. It is rich in beta-carotene, which is needed for healthy skin and good vision; folate, which protects against birth defects; soluble fibre, which slows down the rate at which sugar is released into the bloodstream; and potassium, which helps moderate blood pressure. It is also one of the best sources of rutin, which, along with vitamin C, helps protect the body from infections. A mild diuretic (it makes you pee), it has been recommended traditionally for ailments associated with sluggish digestion and fluid retention. Don’t be alarmed if your urine has an unusually strong smell after eating asparagus; this is quite normal and harmless. Asparagus contains certain sulphur-based compounds and their breakdown products in digestion are thought to be responsible.

      How is asparagus grown?

      The plants or ‘crowns’ that produce asparagus spears take about three years to become established and longer still to become fully productive. They do best in a well-drained rich loam – the most prized type of agricultural land. Some growers cover the asparagus mounds with polythene to warm up the soil and encourage the spears to grow earlier. The delicate spears have to be harvested by hand; mechanization is out. White asparagus is particularly time-consuming to harvest because only the very tip of the spear peeps out from the soil, so it takes an experienced eye to spot it.

      Although we eat some Spanish asparagus that precedes our native crop by a couple of weeks, most of the out-of-season asparagus we eat in Britain comes from Peru. Peru has cornered the world market for this vegetable because the US decided to subsidize its fledgling asparagus industry in order to encourage alternatives to the cultivation of coca, the raw material for cocaine. So Peru’s asparagus exports have grown rapidly over the past decade, but by several accounts the benefits have not filtered down to the asparagus workers or improved their lives. A number of charities have reported that asparagus workers operate in sub-standard conditions and poverty and that child malnutrition is increasing. In the arid Ica region where Peruvian asparagus production is concentrated, this thirsty export vegetable is also depleting the water resources on which local people depend.

      Is asparagus a green choice?

      The carbon ‘foodprint’ of air-freighted asparagus is very heavy indeed. It is not necessary to have such foods supplied from abroad and their air- freighting, shipping and trucking, with its energy-intensive, fuel-guzzling cold chain, is undeniably environmentally destructive. Binge on asparagus when the British crop is in season, then forget about it for the rest of the year.

      Where and when should I buy asparagus?

      Throughout mainland Europe, no vegetable stirs the same excitement as asparagus. Its appearance in mid-April on market stalls and on special restaurant tasting menus heralds the arrival of early summer. In the UK, our asparagus season is short and sweet, six to eight fresh, green, sappy weeks from the third week of April onwards, depending on the weather. Harvested after the ‘hungry gap’ of March and early April when British and Irish vegetable production is at its lowest ebb, asparagus provides a welcome splurge of fleeting, green vegetable after the sturdy roots and brassicas of winter months and before the tender salads of summer. British asparagus has become very sought after in recent years and there is more of it around as growers now increasingly see it as a worthwhile crop to cultivate.

      THE MOST EAGERLY AWAITED SPRING FOOD

      Before imported foreign spears became a fixture on supermarket shelves, asparagus, which had traditionally been an eagerly awaited spring food, most strongly associated with the Vale of Evesham, but also East Anglia and Cambridgeshire, was regarded as a gourmet food, rubbing shoulders with caviar, truffles and oysters. In 1931 an Asparagus Society was set up at Cambridge University’s Trinity Hall to savour the new season’s crop. The customary start date of the British asparagus season was 1 May.

      Until the 1980s, most people’s experience of asparagus – unless they had the good fortune to live in one of our traditional asparagus-growing areas such as the Vale of Evesham – was tinned. Tinned or bottled asparagus is a far cry from fresh, but it is one of the more successful tinned vegetables. Then imported asparagus spears began to appear in swanky, fine-dining establishments. In recent years, however, asparagus has become a fixture in our restaurants, shops and supermarkets. No longer a precious, seasonal crop, a steady flow of air-freighted imported spears has made asparagus available all year round. Is this progress? Most definitely not. Familiarity breeds contempt. It’s hard to get worked up about the 365-day supply of jaded, imported asparagus, but the arrival of our fantastic native crop never fails to thrill.

      Will asparagus break the bank?

      You always pay quite a lot for good asparagus. Weight for weight, it can cost as much as meat or fish. But the compensation is that even a few spears can elevate a dish based on otherwise unremarkable ingredients and make it seem rather luxurious.

      Never waste the bottom part of an asparagus spear. Once peeled, the tender inside can be chopped and added to soups, quiches, pastas and risottos. Thicker, less tender stems are good liquidized in soup along with cheaper green vegetables, such as leeks and peas.

      Aubergine

      There is something miraculous about the way that raw aubergine can be transformed from a bland, spongy vegetable, with a taste and texture about as interesting as blotting paper, into luscious, yielding flesh, impregnated with sultry flavours. To get the best from this languorous vegetable, observe two principles. First, aubergine eats lots of oil. Yes, it does go against the grain to keep on adding it, but if you are not prepared to give aubergine the oil it needs, then eat something else instead. Or at least don’t stint on the oil but then drain off any surplus after cooking. Second, water — and other liquid ingredients such as tomato pulp and wine — is a potential enemy of aubergine. If you add liquid before the aubergine has absorbed enough oil and softened thoroughly, then the skin will stay squeaky-tight and tough and the skin and flesh will remain firm in the mouth and won’t absorb as well the flavours of other ingredients.

      Aubergine has a slightly bitter taste, which is part of its charm. This characteristic is most evident in recipes where you keep the skin on and slightly char it. It is often recommended that you slice or chop aubergine before cooking and leave it sprinkled with salt for half an hour or so to reduce this bitterness. Most of the aubergines we buy are not particularly bitter to start with, so this isn’t really necessary. However, salting does have the advantage of drawing out water from the aubergine, which is helpful because, as a result of the way they are grown, most aubergines we cook with in Britain and Ireland are more watery than those grown outdoors in hot countries. Salting also enhances the flavour (even if you rinse the salt off thoroughly) and firms up the flesh, which means that it absorbs less oil.

      The aubergines on sale in Britain and Ireland tend to be much of a muchness. The dark purple, pear-drop-shaped aubergine of uniform size and dimensions rules the roost. Middle Eastern and Asian shops often sell more varied types, with different shapes, sizes and skin tones from white through violet to purple-black. These can have subtly different flavours, being more and less bitter, and a smoother texture when cooked. Whatever sort of aubergine you go for, choose fresh ones. These should look smooth-skinned and firm and feel heavy for their size.

      Things to do with aubergine

      • Using a ridged, cast-iron grill pan or under a grill, char whole aubergines