It’s summer. The air is hot and sticky, and the daylight stretches out like a cat until it’s almost ten o’clock. It is not the time of year for hot soups. Yet it is the time of year for asparagus, and one of my favorite asparagus dishes is spargel suppe mit fladle, which is Swabian (Schwäbisch) for asparagus soup with strips of pancake. It’s delicious (I’m spooning down my third bowl between sentences), and it’s a recipe that was born of a desire not to waste a single ounce of a vegetable you’ll only see once a year. So when the Beard proposed making it, I interrogated him on his methods so that I could share the recipe with you.

In America, I was used to eating green asparagus, and it wasn’t until I moved to Germany that I was introduced to its albino cousin. As white asparagus is grown underground to prevent it from taking on any color, it also develops a slightly woody peel that needs to be removed (by potato peeler or knife) before cooking and inhaling. Which is a big frickin’ waste, if you love asparagus and want to get the most out of the fruits of a relatively short growing season. (And in Germany the only place you’re going to find asparagus once the season is over is looking pale and sickly in a glass. This is a country that takes seasonality seriously. Or at least more seriously than America.)

This simple recipe uses the asparagus peels to create a broth that you then fill with bits of asparagus, spices, and strips of pancake. Though you do need to throw the peels away after the first step, you can be sure you’ve gotten just about all the nutrients out of them first. So without further rambling, here is the recipe:

Ingredients:
white asparagus
water
oil or fat of whatever sort you have around
spices (salt, pepper, parsley, and whatever else you have around)

Step one. Peel your (white) asparagus. Places the peels in your soup pot, and the peeled bodies in a bowl or pot of cold water so they don’t dry out before you need them. Fill your soup pot of peels with water and bring to a boil. Turn off heat and let soak for as long as you have the time to wait. The longer the brew soaks, the more flavor you’ll have in the broth. A half an hour will do if you’re pressed for time.

Step two. Filter out the asparagus peels with a colander spoon, and throw them on the compost. Cut up peeled asparagus bodies and place in broth, along with a few tablespoons of the fat of your choice. Bring to a boil again, adding seasoning to taste (the Beard used salt, pepper, and parsley).

Step three. Make pancakes. Roll up pancakes and slice into thin strips. Add strips of pancake to the soup once served.

The finished product looks something like this:

I like free stuff. If you like free stuff and happened to like what I showed you of my band’s music last week, you can enter to win one of our CDs over on the Young Germany facebook page right now (friend Young Germany and leave a comment to enter). Then it’s almost like I did the giveaway over here, but without me having to foot the postage to get the CDs to the winners. Leave two comments in a row, and I’ll enter your name in the drawing twice. Huzzah.

Book luddites unite! I have a new button, and you can have it too if you’re a printed-book lover, just click on the image below for the code. It doesn’t do anything except to look pretty and to help you say “I like books, wohoo!” even louder than before.

I am not one of those people who claims that reading words on paper is somehow more valuable than reading words on a screen. I just like reading words on paper. A lot. And I especially like the way that books, when I am finished with them, are capable of bio-degrading, or becoming a fire starter in my woodstove. Unlike the plastic and metal parts of my computer/phone/Kindle/whatever. When the world goes to shit those aren’t going to be useful at all.

Of course, industry can rain on just about any parade, and the book printing and binding industry are using nasty chemicals (that tend to end up floating around in all sorts of places where they shouldn’t be), and when I think about what a world post-industrial-civilization would look like, I often wonder what would become of the printed word. I have a friend intent on arming himself and defending the public library from looters, if it comes to that (ever read A Canticle for Lebowitz*?), and I know that if we lived in the same place in a collapse situation I’d be right there beside him.

That being said I can’t imagine that mass-market printing would continue in any form after a big economic crash or environmental disaster. (Though I bet there would be tiny pockets of steam punks running big bulky presses and laughing at the rest of the world from beneath their monocles and well-brushed top hats.) I can imagine enormous public libraries whose books are painstakingly re-copied onto paper handmade from the contents of this century’s trash bins. I can imagine traveling tellers, and evenings spent listening instead of reading. I can imagine printing very small runs on hand-run presses, and I can imagine the crafts handwriting and oral storytelling becoming highly valued art forms. And though the thought of having to become more social than I currently am in order to continue my trade, a world with neither Kindles or mass-produced books doesn’t sound all that bad.

Where do you stand on the debate about the printed word? Are you newly in love with your Kindle (depsite previous misgivings)? Or are you a printed-book fetishist, like me? Would you be beside us, defending the public library from the hands of the angry mobs so that humans could continue to learn from their mistakes and their successes in a world lacking the electricity to run electronic reading devices?

*In case you haven’t read it, A Canticle for Liebowitz is a post-apocalyptic novel that takes place thousands of years after humans destroy most of the world with bombs (nukes, if I recall correctly) and send the world catapulting back into the dark ages. After all the destruction, the masses get very upset with the scientists of the world for having made it all possible; professors are lynched and libraries are burned.

PS Next week I’ll be getting back to doing regular dumspter finds of the week on Wednesdays; I’ve got a heap of finds waiting to be photographed at home and a new submission from Nashville, TN.