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In their simplest form, the shoots are boiled or steamed until tender and served with a light sauce like hollandaise or melted butter or a drizzle of olive oil with a dusting of Parmesan cheese. A refinement is to tie the shoots into sheaves and stand them so that the lower part of the stalks are boiled, while the tenderer heads are steamed. Tall cylindrical asparagus cooking pots have liners with handles and perforated bases to make this process foolproof.
Unlike most vegetables, where the smaller and thinner are the more tender, thick asparagus stalks have more tender volume to the proportion of skin. When asparagus have been too long in the market, the cut ends will have dried and gone slightly concave. The best asparagus are picked and washed while the water comes to the boil. Fastidious cooks scrape asparagus stalks with a vegetable peeler, stroking away from the head, and refresh them in ice-cold water before steaming them. Small or full-sized stalks can be made into asparagus soup. Cantonese restaurants in the United States often serve asparagus stir-fried with chicken, shrimp, or beef.
One problem with asparagus is that a constituent of the plant is metabolised and excreted in the urine, giving it a distictive, mildly unpleasant odour. Apparently not everyone who eats asparagus produces the odor, but also not everyone is able to smell the odor once it is produced. [1]
The amino acid asparagine gets its name from asparagus, the asparagus plant being rich in this compound.
Asparagus as a vegetable is widely grown around villages near Evesham in the Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire, England, and the plant grows wild on England's south coast.
Many unrelated plants are called "asparagus" or "used as asparagus" when their shoots are used in a similar way.
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The shoots of a related plant, Ornithogalum pyrenaicum, called Prussian asparagus, have been used for similar purposes as genuine asparagus.