Spring has arrived in Paris at last! And though it doesn’t look like it from my window today, at least it looks like it at the supermarché. I’ve been stocking up on strawberries, rhubarb, and asparagus.

Asparagus is everywhere: exploding out of shopping bags in string bundles, stacked and arranged by color and size in the open markets—small green asparagus, fat white asparagus (do they remind you of human fingers, too, chopped and swollen in vinegar jars?), and asparagus galore on all the menus at the trendy neo-bistros my parents took me to during their April visit (what are parents for?), steamed in nasturtium cream from Bresse, shaved to sharp points for piercing poached eggs in bacon foam, atop a tower of lavender goat cheese…

Asparagus seems so quintessentially French to me, ever since reading Swann’s Way, where Marcel describes his cook, Françoise, preparing the vegetable for dinner, and suddenly his imagination has run away, taking you all the way to—well, the place where food often ends up, long after a meal is over…

At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was for dinner, its preparation would already have begun… what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet—still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed—with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognize again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like one of Shakespeare’s fairies) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.