Even with this classic quickie there are disagreements: do you, for instance, belong to the “browned butter” school or the “unbrowned”?  I am a fervent member of the Browns.  And while I break off the tough stalk ends only a raging masochist would leave on, I find all the trimming and peeling prescribed in many excellent Italian cookbooks a total waste of time.  As for the prevalent notion of lining up your asparagus head to toe, that suggests the reclining inhabitants of an over-populated flophouse.  I must also record here my preference for stalks of at least moderate girth.  Thistley specimens need not apply, their taste is too elusive, unsavorable.  My chief dining companion of the last forty-three years will tell you I like all my food “large” (toothsome Schwarzeneggerian strawberries, for instance), but that would be grossly unfair.

Steam a good dozen asparagus stalks per person for main course eating.   Place the stalks on an oval serving platter, hide them (almost) under a blanket of grated dry jack or parmesan cheese and pour over it enough browned butter to somewhat melt the cheese.  Serve with a generous supply of lemon wedges.

Cooking time?  I recommend steaming your asparagus until the stalks are still an attractive green but no longer chewy.  A delicate balance, of course, rather like that confronting airplane pilots who want to land on the last yard of bayside runway and not in the drink.  That zealous advocate of grey food, Jane Austen’s Mr. Woodhouse, obviously wouldn’t get it.  And fiction, I’m afraid, is full of characters so busy sleuthing, seducing, philosophizing, contemplating their psychic navels, they have scant time left for a really interesting plate of food.

Flaubert, of course, could conjure a feast, a feast of comically hyperbolic proportions, and Dickens could wax interestingly on the subject of “apoplectic opulence”; elsewhere among the masters we’re often left with literarily and gastronomically lo-fat crumbs.

MEANWHILE there’s writing about bad food that’s so vivid in its suggestiveness you even enjoy the thought of that badness, as in the “meat loaf and mashed potatoes and brown Betty at the Faculty club” (lucky we don’t have to eat it) in an Edmund White short story

       . . And leftover saffron mayonnaise (see saffron minestrone) will work very nicely with asparagus as well as the vinaigrette of the title above.

Steam asparagus stalks and cool; dress them with our standard mustard vinaigrette (page 1) combined with mashed hard boiled egg and minced parsley in rather liberal amounts: 1 egg would be sufficient for 2 servings.  I would also tend to intensify the mustard element: in other words, more than 1/4 teaspoon is indicated.  Remember, asparagus and mustard go in for heady assignations.

And note as well that the haunting combination of chopped cilantro and fresh tarragon is an impressive substitute for the parsley above.

        The adjacent dressing is a slight variation on a lemony lubricant I’ve been lapping up at Lupo’s, now Tommaso’s, a checkered-tablecloth trattoria in San Francisco’s North Beach, for forty years at least.  The near-anachronistic Lupo’s, I mean Tommaso’s, is the sort of restaurant — with Bay of Naples mural, candles in Chianti flasks, other presudo Campanian knicknackery — that belongs in an old Capra comedy with Jimmy Stewart stutttering over his spaghetti and maybe Mischa Auer a pirouetting waiter.  Almost lost amidst a flock of distinctly un-Capran topless bars, Code-clueless, Tommaso’s recently asserted its identity with handsome new signage in tune with the gastronomical revival sweeping a sleaze-troubled corner of the Beach.  To think that two generations ago this was the only pizza-serving restaurant in a city of 700,000 bon vivants white- or blue-collared.  Obviously a case of stunted culinary evolution.  To think, also, that back in the 70s our teenage son was mastermind of the sound system at the disco across the street.

        By the way, the flat Italian mega-beans perform well in a Niçoise salad.  Their season, alas, is compressed and unpredictable, as if the god of Absolutely Unboring Vegetables were hoarding them for his or her own dining terrace in the sky. And prices vary like those for the techiest sort of stock.

Now be advised that “Italian beans” are sometimes called Roma beans in this country — and in a market in Ferrara, Italy I recently saw them under the hat of “Spanish beans.”

So: trim broccoli or Italian beans of whatever “nationality” appropriately — I, for one, like to eat as much broccoli stem as possible (I favor laying out the stems in plain view, but my mother back in the Georgian 40s used to chop them up and bury ‘em, more as sin than treasure, in the brush) — then steam your veg and cool.  Dress them with our good friend Lupo Vinaigrette: add to 2-plus parts olive oil 1 part combined red wine vinegar and lemon juice in approximately equal amounts, plus a liberal squeeze of pressed garlic and a light sprinkle of oregano and rosemary.

VARIATION: For a little added snap I sometimes subdivide the olive oil element in this vinaigrette, using, say, 1/3 “extra virgin” to 2/3 “pure.”