Asparagus

asparagus spears

As I sat in the White Pheasant in Fordham my colleague and Clem Tompsett, the “Carrot King” of the Fens tucked into their starter of asparagus, whilst I had asparagus soup.  Clem explained to me that asparagus helped him accumulate enough money to buy his first piece of land just under 10 acres in 1948. Brought up by his grandparents on their dairy farm near Soham as a young boy he planted an asparagus bed and when in season he harvested it and took it on his bike to market to sell.

Asparagus has always been grown in the Fens and eastern counties. Being a short season and a high value crop that ties up land for a few years it was a useful second income for smallholders otherwise occupied working on local farms. It could be maintained and cropped by a young family. Indeed, even in modern times, commercial growers have it typically as a subsidiary or second income. In its short season it requires harvesting, usually early in the morning to maintain its freshness. It is a manual process, usually with a sharp curved knife that you cut close to the surface. The more you cut the more you yield. Early morning harvesting helps maintain its freshness as you get it to market or to a chilled pack-house. Its value can be so great as to attract criminal gangs that descend on a field in the dark  to steal a crop using headlamps. I’ve known this happen several times and know of one farmer that “pattern tested” the van of one gang with his shotgun.

But what is the origin and history of asparagus? As a plant it grows well in coastal areas and can survive and flourish in salty air conditions. It most probably originated around the Mediterranean  coast and was brought to Britain by the Romans. It appears that its most popular area for growing was the south of England from Cornwall through to Kent. As London grew the Kent market gardeners were well positioned to grow this high value seasonal crop and we see the growing and selling of asparagus creep up the east coat from the seventeenth century into Suffolk, Norfolk and into Lincolnshire by the eighteenth century. In the eastern counties and Fens you see it called “sparrow grass” up to the 1960’s. But, such a term often signified a class difference as we see in this piece of snobbery  written in the Daily Express in 1926:

“SPARROW GRASS – ‘The sparrers ain’t no blinkin’ fools’, observed a chorus girl (raised by marriage to peerage) to her guests with her mouth full of asparagus. Her ladyship’s belief that asparagus forms the favourite food of sparrows was once widely held in fashionable circles. In the correspondence of high-born ladies during the eighteenth century the stuff is almost invariably spelt ‘sparrow grass’. The name is really a Greek word, the derivation of which  has apparently puzzled Liddell and Scott who ‘invented the Greek language’. We get it through the Romans, who applied the term to some mysterious mountain plants; but no Roman, except Pliny, ever took kindly to botany. Our asparagus is a native plant which was once fairly common on our southern and western coasts, and gave the name Asparagus Island in Cornwall.”

It is possibly a sign of the value of asparagus that in 1717 in Louth, Lincolnshire the town rents were paid ‘in kind’ to the six assistants of Louth that managed the property owned by the town: “Thomas Garrott, for cottages in Westgate – 200 sparrowgrass on Whitsunday.”