History of Asparagus

A distant cousin of the onion, the distinguished asparagus was once classified as a member of the lilaceae family. Its history goes back as far as that of the leek and has been consumed for over 2000 years. This garden plant originated in the eastern Mediterranean countries and traces of wild varieties have been discovered in Africa.

As with all vegetables the first asparagus was discovered in the wild. A wild asparagus has thin shoots thinner than a pencil and is much different than the asparagus that you find In your grocery counter. Through selective breeding and growing techniques they developed a thicker stem with more edible flesh.

The asparagus plant appeared in an Egyptian frieze dating back to 3000 BC, with Queen Nefertiti allegedly an asparagus fan. Archaeologists found traces of asparagus on dishware when excavating the Pyramid of Sakkara, along with other coveted foods such as figs and melons. In this culture, this vegetable was considered sacred, used in religious ceremonies.

From the earliest Greek records, garden asparagus and its wild relatives were used as medicines.

The Greeks used it for toothache and bee stings. Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the Roman army, recommended it for dysentery, "griefs" of the kidneys and dislocations as well.

In ancient Greece, asparagus was considered to be a plant with sacred and aphrodisiac virtues and the Greeks were interested in its biological and pharmaceutical qualities. In the area of Ancient Greece known as Boeotia, “after veiling the bride, they put on her head a chaplet of asparagus.

Hippocrates, the ancient Greek doctor, used asparagus to treat diarrhoea and pains of the urethra. This plant, in fact, contains asparagines which is known for it diuretic properties. The Romans, for their part, appreciated the plants gastronomic qualities. They ate it as an entrée or as a vegetable accompanying fish. Asparagus was largely forgotten during the Middle Ages but continued to be cultivated by the Arabs. Caesar’s legions returning from the Orient brought the asparagus back to Europe.

It was cultivated in gardens in ancient Rome some as far back as the first century AD. Of the varieties produced, it was said one was so big each spear weighed 1/3 of a pound.

Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus was said to have organized elite military units to search out this vegetable. He would then locate the fastest runners to take the fresh asparagus spears into the frozen Alps for storage purposes. Ancient Greeks, meanwhile, harvested wild asparagus and connected this vegetable to their goddess of love, Aphrodite – and numerous other cultures have also considered freshly sprouted asparagus a symbol of fertility.

After the demise of the Roman Empire little is heard of regarding the history of asparagus for a while, evidence suggests that asparagus was being grown in French monasteries in 1459 but it is unheard of in England or Germany until the mid 1500's.

The Tacunium Sanitatis, a health manual of 13th and 14th century Europe, said it opened the humors and stimulated carnal relations. Gerard, in 1633, noted it was a mild diuretic, good for kidneys and bladder. These are most likely references to the garden asparagus. From the Romans through the Renaissance, the writers disagreed whether wild or cultivated asparagus was better for you).

In the 16th Century asparagus starts to appear in the history books again. It has reached France and England with Louis XIV of France allegedly having special greenhouses built to grow his asparagus.

French monasteries included this plant in their gardens 600 years ago – and, if you wanted to please the Sun King, Louis XIV, you could bring his second wife, Madame de Maintenon, a new asparagus recipe. She gathered them into a book and asparagus soup a la Maintenon is still prized today.

As quoted above Samuel Pepys the famous diarist records buying a "hundred of sparrow grass" in Fenchurch Street, London in 1667.

It is thought that colonists brought asparagus to North America in the 1700s planting it initially in New England. By the 1850s it had found its way to North California. It was brought to America by early colonists but was not widely eaten until the 19th and 20th centuries when canning made it much more available. Before that, it was either eaten fresh early in the spring or dried.

Asparagus has probably always been a food mainly for the elite since it is labor intensive to harvest and is only harvested for a few weeks a year. Poor people would likely harvest a meal and then go on to other foods. It is remarkable in being one of our few perennial vegetables and the roots will produce shoots for at least ten years, so gathering semi-wild asparagus every spring would fit into foraging for wild vegetables. There is still a distinct "asparagus season" when good quality fresh asparagus is available at reasonable prices, while the rest of the year it is more expensive and, if fresh, shipped long distances.

White asparagus is the same plant as green asparagus, it is simply protected from sunlight so chlorophyll, which produces the green color, does not form. That is particularly labor-intensive to produce but likely goes back to the Romans. It was certainly known 300 years ago: see 1696 painting by Adriaen Coorte. Other colors of asparagus are produced by different varieties.

The Name:

The commercially grown and traded asparagus is garden asparagus, Asparagus officinalis in the asparagus family, Asparagaceae. The asparaguses are native to Eurasia.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans used a Persian word "asparag" which meant shoot. Our name, asparagus, is based on the Greek name sperage, which was applied to a variety of edible shoots. In the 16th century we find the term "sparagus" used in English speaking countries. In England, that name didn't make any particular sense to the peasants, coming to them as sperage or asparagus, so they turned the name into "sparrow grass." It has also been called coralwort for the red fruits (wort is an old word meaning plant). During the 19th century Asparagus took over about the same time that cultivation of asparagus started in the United States.

The species epithet, officialis, in the scientific name Asparagus officinalis, means "of the work shop", that is, the one the herbalist recommended. That choice of species epithet means that when garden asparagus was given its scientific name, Linnaeus, who named it, recognized it as a medicinal plant. The aparagus collected in Greece was one of the wild species, such as A. acutifolius.

A final, technical point about asparagus: It is not a lily. Plant classifications represent relationships, these days tested by comparing their DNA. Asparagus is classified in the plant family Asparagaceae, obviously named after it, a family which includes 152 other genera and up to 2,900 species, from yuccas (genus Yucca) and agaves (Agave) to scillas (Scilla). You can still read that it is in the lily family, Liliaceae, but that is no longer true.

Historically, the lily family was a catch-all for plants with narrow leaves and flower parts in groups of three or six. DNA technology has shown those plants to be quite distantly related to lilies. Today true lilies (e.g. the madonna lily, Lilium album) are in the lily family in the order Liliales. (Species are grouped into genera, genera into families, families grouped into orders, representing ever more distant relatives).

Asparagus in the family Asparagaceae is in the order Asparagales. Also classified in Asparagales are irises (family Iridaceae), orchids (family Orchidaceae), and many others. Since lilies are in a different order than asparagus, and irises and orchids are in the same order, asparagus is substantially more closely related to orchids than lilies. The two orders, Asparagales and Liliales, last had a common ancestor in the mid-Cretaceous, 125 to 110 million years ago, when dinosaurs still walked the earth. It is more valid to call asparagus a century plant (Agave) than a lily, because it is much more closely related.