The History of Asparagus

We look east and west to find the origins of asparagus, but are not able to state its origins with certainty. Asparagus appears late in the history of Chinese foods, but today Taiwan has made a major industry of exporting asparagus. Asparagus grows best in sandy soil in cooler climates, yet we hear of it in the history books written by the ancient Romans. It is depicted in ancient Egyptian writing and has grown in Syria and Spain since ancient times.

To the Greeks, asparagus was a wild plant. It was the Roman writer Cato who first detailed instructions for raising asparagus - the first known cultivated asparagus that we find in written history.

Pliny the Elder, one of our major sources for food history, includes asparagus in his Materia Medica.


Though he mostly refers to wild asparagus, he mentions a large asparagus grown in Ravenna. Juvenal served "some wild asparagus, gathered by the bailiff's wife," another reference to wild asparagus. Apicius gave recipes but they may or may not have been for cultivated asparagus. The Emperor Augustus is supposed to have been very fond of it and to have originated a saying, Velocius quam asparagi coquantur - Quicker than you can cook asparagus. Bartolomeo Sacchi, better known as Platina, who was a papal librarian, not a cook, mentions asparagus in his work, “On Right Pleasure and Good Health” in about 1475. This is a hidden history.

King Louis XVI of France, who did indeed dress in silken splendor when he dined, was so in love with asparagus that his gardeners were instructed to grow it in hothouses for his year round pleasure. Globalization has made us almost as lucky as kings without the risk of being beheaded, and today we import asparagus from Mexico or Peru in the winter.

It was in the nineteenth century when dinners became great shows of wealth that asparagus took its place in history as the pampered princess (we do think of this as feminine) of vegetables. Perhaps it was the cost of asparagus that elevated it to such heights and even Brillat- Savarin stated, "They are certainly very fine, but at such a price no one but the King or some prince will be able to eat them."

Wild asparagus is still found and used today, growing in very thin stalks in the hills of Provence. These fine stalks are often chopped and used in omelets, just as we might peel and chop the larger commercial stalks of asparagus.