If Japan can celebrate the cherry blossom season with joyous parades, street dances and picnicking, I do think we could show a little more enthusiasm for the English asparagus season, which started on May 1 and lasts only until the middle of June.

This fleeting pleasure, a member of the lily family, has been cultivated for over 2,500 years, and prized in Britain since the 16th century — but only in the privacy of our own homes.

Always buy twice as much asparagus as you think you can eat or afford. It’s worth going without such boring things as milk, bread and potatoes for a week in order to feast on the full, earthy, chlorophyllic flavour of the new season’s spears.

Choose the greenest of green asparagus you can find, with tightly closed lavender-tinted tips. Then snap off the fibrous ends by bending each stalk, rinse in cold water and you’re ready to cook. Peel the ends if you like — I don’t bother unless they’re quite fat — and cook in a wide pan of simmering salted water until tender but still bright green. Forget all that nonsense about asparagus cookers and standing them upright to save the tips from overcooking. Just lay the spears flat in a single layer and they will cook evenly enough.

Their colour is the easiest indicator of cooking times — if the spears start losing that vibrant spring-like green, they’re on their way to being overcooked. Whip them out, drain them quickly and serve with butter or extra-virgin olive oil, sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Perfect.

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Ingredients
Feeds 2. Takes 10 mins.

Dr Edouard de Pomiane, the lively French professor and gastronome, said in Cooking With Pomiane (out of print) that asparagus served merely in butter was a little disappointing. He suggested frying breadcrumbs in the butter, noting how the bread swells in the melted butter and forms a mixture that sticks to the asparagus stems. “We have already made some progress,” he noted.

500g medium green asparagus
1tbsp butter
1tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove, crushed
2 anchovy fillets, finely chopped
3 to 4tbsp coarse bread crumbs (homemade are more interesting)
1tsp finely chopped parsley
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Wash the asparagus, and bend each spear until it snaps. Discard the woody ends, and peel the thick end of the asparagus. Bring a frying pan of salted water to the boil, add the asparagus and cook for four or five minutes, depending on thickness. The asparagus is done when the tip of a knife inserted in the thickest part of a spear meets with no resistance. Drain well.

Empty the pan, wipe dry, and return to the heat with the butter and olive oil. When it foams, add the garlic and anchovy, and allow the anchovy to melt over gentle heat without browning the garlic. Add the bread crumbs and stir with a wooden spoon until they are golden and have absorbed the butter and oil. Add the parsley, sea salt and pepper, stirring well.

Arrange the asparagus on a serving platter or on two warm dinner plates, and spoon the crumbs over the top. Serve hot.

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