The only asparagus most of us come across is the tinned variety. Not too bad at all, though nothing like the fresh (i.e. that day's cutting). In Germany the great season for the fresh asparagus is from mid-May to mid-June, and Giles Mac Donogh, in the Saturday Fi- nancial Times had an excellent, mouth-watering article on this delicious vegetable. The spears, as they may be called, can be green or white; the white are those which have been sanded up to keep it so. The Germans grow excellent asparagus where the soil is of the necessary texture, the more notable places being near Heidelberg and along the Rhine. Some prefer white; indeed Mac Donogh writes: "Since I discovered German asparagus, I have been quite incapable of eating the course-flavoured green stuff which now seems to me the pinnacle of decadence, although I had some flavoursome spears from Cornwall the other day." But there is another vexed question: do you pick up the spears with thumb and forefinger or cut them up with knife and fork?
He then tells a story which doesn't answer that question but, even if not one hundred per cent accurate, gives us a hint of the way things may have been done in Germany in the 1930s. Some drunken Korps students in Heidelberg (the people who went in for the Mensur of duelling, which left those scars on the cheek, a sign of distinction to some elements of German society), well on in liquour, were debating this subject of the technique of the knife and fork or finger and thumb, over a plate of local asparagus. "The Fuhrer knows everything," said one, "let's ask him." So a call was put through to the Chancellery in Berlin, which was answered by an adjutant. Hitler was informed. He took, writes Mac Donogh, "a predictably dim view of this levity. His draconian response was to ban the elite brotherhoods for the duration of the Third Reich."
Mac Donogh reminds his readers that Hitler's view might have been interesting, for he was a vegetarian and "allegedly no friend of such niceties as knives and forks. As much as we can speculate, he almost certainly ate asparagus with his fingers." Another day, a few words about that lovely city Heidelberg.