On Making Decisions: Asparagus, Two Ways

white asparagus with vinaigrette or creamy orzo with green asparagus; re-reading Le Cid, civil resistance

December 1636, Théâtre du Marais. The first performance of Le Cid by Pierre Corneille was staged in Paris. After a dispute about who should be the rightful king’s governor between Don Diègue and Don Gomès (some things never grow old!), the latter slaps Don Diègue who, an elderly man, asks his son to carry his revenge through a combat with Don Gomès. The problem is that Rodrigue is likely to win and if he does, he’d be killing the father of his lover, Chimène, who in return must decide between honouring her promise of marrying Rodrigue or her family name, a decision on which Rodrigue’s life depends. At the crux of this resolution sits a moral dilemma between love and honour, while the outcome is influenced by each character’s upbringing and setting (their ingrained sense of family duty and definition of honour) as well as the importance they are willing to grant their own feelings. ‘L’un m’anime le coeur, l’autre retient mon bras’, Rodrigue says in the first play’s act, as he realises that he must honour his father, thus not marry Chimène and most likely be killed for his crime. One beats my heart, the other holds my arm. Rodrigue and Chimène incarnate what is called in modern language ‘a Cornelian dilemma’, or a situation in which a decision has to be made but none of the two options would lead to an appealing consequence. 

Does this sound familiar to you too? Our current social organisation is built around having to make rapid, often uninformed, decisions. The inequalities that blind someone who believes to have a choice – social and financial mobility, freedom of movement, compromises and other responsibilities that need fulfilling simply to put bread on a table or to be able to sleep under a safe roof – transform most decisions into a Cornelian dilemma. At the individual level, at least. 

October 2022, London. Two facts are at the origin of this edition of The Onion Papers: while trying to make a difficult decision with my partner on Monday, my personal lexicon interrupted my monologue when I said, seemingly out of nowhere: ‘This is like having to choose between the plague and the cholera’. I translated a French idiom and Ludo raised an eyebrow, which led me on to detailing that we were finding ourselves before a Cornelian dilemma. Language is deceitful in stressful situations, yet I went home and I kept thinking about Le Cid. The first time I had read the book it was as part of the school curriculum. I must have been around thirteen years old, in 4ème, and I was wearing Converse All Star shoes, on which I had made doodles across the white tips. I spent a lot of time thinking about ‘first love’ back then, wondering when I would love the way Chimène does. Would I choose love or honour? What is honour if a name doesn’t resonate as important as it would have done within a royal and clerical organisation chart? Does that mean that I could put the type of honour I want behind my own forename, me, Margaux? I was a teenager, the whole world was gravitating around my own experience of it, and I had not grasped the workings and layers of capitalism yet. The second reason for this newsletter is that one bag of asparagus currently costs £0.89 with Tesco Clubcard. This means that I’ve been eating a lot of asparagus – in salad, as a ramen topping and in a creamy orzo – and they are delicious (recipes to follow).

A French school edition of Le Cid by Pierre Corneille

The concept of ‘supreme truth’, the moment when characters understand the level of their involvement in their own dilemma, or how much making a choice will shape their future, also defines Corneille’s theatre. This theme interests me the most because such a framework applies to everyday life often, and to the complex method one goes through when making a decision in a society that is rooted into hierarchy. Do you list pros and cons or do you talk through different scenarios with a trusted advisor? Are you impulsive or are you avoidant when taking a decision that could lead to a (radical) change? I use the second person singular and as you read, you probably turn defensive because, through this linguistic choice, I’m supposedly empowering you in the face of your own dilemmas. But who gets to define morality in our modern society? What was called ‘supreme truth’ in a text from the seventeenth century still stands, power agencies make us presume there is no other option than the one that is anticipated from our persona. Spoiler: Rodrigue picks blood and to honour his father over love; second spoiler, Chimène chooses to love Rodrigue regardless of him having killed her father.  

When Le Cid was written and performed, literature and the theatre didn’t benefit from as much genre freedom as they started gaining from the eighteenth century in France. Clerical and royal instances had a right to exercise judgement over productions – and so they did for Le Cid, eventually launching ‘La querelle du Cid’ and resulting with the recently formed Académie française publishing an official review of the play. The quarrel was in fact a series of arguments between those who praised the birth of the French classical tragedy and those who denounced Corneille’s misusage of the Aristotelian rules, his stepping away from the canon, and those who found Le Cid an implausible story, a stretch from the poetic of drama and thus morally questionable, a vulgar tragicomedy. Some critics also accused Corneille of plagiarism from Guillén de Castro’s Las Mocedades del Cid. 

What fascinates me about Le Cid lies in its complex legacy between being the nest of a heated literary dispute while staging a paradox that is at the birth of the expression ‘a Cornelian dilemma’ – something so tragic that it has become comical. Comical as for comic relief. This is a text that introduced deep conversations from the definitions of classicism on to the birth of modern playwriting, as well as inspired performances that acknowledged some of the unsaid truths about the art of writing plays, a dichotomy between literature and entertainment. In terms of texture, the narrative of Le Cid revolves around a conflict of its own. Rodrigue killed Don Gomès and cried and Chimène cried of despair, and loved back. The execution is modern: a vicious circle, a setting in which expectations suppress wishes, a capitalist framework for dilemmas. Le Cid is a puppet show for the difficulty of making a decision because while one can attempt to weigh present currencies before trading, few people have enough power agency and wealth to foresee and control the outcome of their own decisions.

In the meantime, asparagus are discounted and this has influenced what I’m cooking for dinner. Make it creamy, an easy dilemma for this oaty orzo with green asparagus:
1 onion, thinly chopped
A handful of parsley, thinly chopped
A handful of asparagus, bottom chopped, tips reserved and middle parts diced
A few tablespoons of oat cream
160g orzo 

Start with making a broth with parsley stems and the hard (bottom) bits of the asparagus. In a pot, bring everything to the boil and leave the liquid to simmer. Heat up a drizzle of olive oil inside a separate heavy duty pan. Gently fry the chopped parsley and onion. 

Add the diced asparagus bits and cook them until they are fragrant and braised. Turn off the heat and pour in a few tablespoons of broth before reducing the asparagus with an immersion blender. It’s fine to leave some chunks, but the colour should be green and the consistency thick. 

Turn the heat back on. Add the asparagus tips and the orzo. Swirl for a minute or so, then start adding the broth slowly and until the orzo is fully cooked. This should take about 10 minutes. When the orzo is about two minutes from being cooked, stir in the oat cream and keep mixing until you reach the wanted consistency. 

This dish is creamy and green and generous. Best eaten with a tiny spoon, I love to scrape the bottom of the pan. This is the tastiest part, a concentrate of asparagus and a wild testament of roots.

a warm dinner of orzo, served with oat cream and green asparagus

Returning to Corneille’s script, Le Cid’s beauty – or the tragic side of the play – sits with Chimène, who faces a paradox. The daughter of Don Gomès, her destiny is to love and marry the man who has killed her father in a physical duel. Some of the most vivid critiques about Le Cid are about the character of Chimène, as her choices and reactions were judged implausible (did I say some things never grow old?). She was also condemned as immoral for wanting to see Rodrigue despite him having killed her own father.

Il semble toutefois que mon âme troublée
Refuse cette joie, et s’en trouve accablée
Un moment donne au sort des visages divers,
Et dans ce grand bonheur je crains un grand revers. 

Chimène ends the first scene of the first act, or as such some of my favourite verses were written: It seems that my troubled soul nonetheless / Refuses this joy, and becomes oppressed / One moment casts a spell over diverse figures / And from this great happiness I fear a greater setback (this is my own translation/reading). While Chimène is a theatre character of the seventeenth century, she highlights a dilemma that strikes a chord with the hubris of our modern Western society, in which the emotional self is often to be blamed for our ill-fated world. See my wary eyes as I carry my recycling bag outside, unsure if I can include flexible plastics in my borough even though I have lived here for over two years; the word carbon footprint I have little intellectual and factual grasp of, yet sways my activities and travels; who do I choose to love and how often do I have sex; career goals, salary levels and where do I live; ownership, how moral is your lifestyle? 

The Cornelian dilemma itself often prevents making a decision. À quoi bon, I might say and ‘what’s the point,’ you might agree in response. The human creature has an appetite to lean on what’s expected and known already, and in fact Chimène was described as a non-realistic character. Her choices were reviewed as unlikely, or read as not being the ones the moral of the period should ask a woman of her social etiquette. To love and to spur into the romantic side of life instead of keeping the chin on which her name is attached up.

On the one hand, I have a taste for the dramatic reading of life. One truth about myself. On the other hand, it’s hard not to acknowledge that we – the humankind – are finding ourselves at a crossing road at which we must take actions to build a society that can thrive and nurse our planet back to health. The 2022 IPCC report was clear: we’re set to reach the 1.5C bar within the next two decades. We have seen fires and floods turning hemispheres upside down all summer long, and this October continues to break temperature records. Not only we’re looking at a bleak picture in terms of the environment between drying lands and bleaching corals, the consequences on our functioning will be dramatic too, with millions of climate refugees and food shortages and resulting conflicts at short notice. A bigger truth.  

That is, our shared Cornelian dilemma – One moment casts a spell over diverse figures / And from this great happiness I fear a greater setback, Chimène says – between keeping business as usual and disrupting capitalist systems. Because it’s important to remember that there are policies to name responsible for our climate emergency, those that burn resources into profits, yet it’s paralysing when the same policies happen to form the structure that allows us to work, entertain and feed ourselves, to live too.  

Rodrigue chose blood over love, however we must depart from Le Cid and return to our present days. The answer to our dilemma must be nonviolent and united, a civilian resistance. From dernière rénovation in France to Just Stop Oil in the UK, activist groups are working hard to secure a habitable planet. Their proposal is simple and both quote Professor Sir David King – we have three years to ‘commit to ending all new licences and consent for exploration, development and production of fossil fuels.’ End of the dilemma. The solution is a coalition of civilians who work together, creating an organised network that takes actions from a variety of skills and means, a paradox that reverses the oiled machine of production itself. Energy transition, both literally and intellectually.

boiling white asparagus with a bunch of rosemary and lemon juice

Let’s end with a tasty celebration of past and future movements of civil resistance; a second dish of white asparagus, the underdog kind. White asparagus are grown underground, higher in fibre and sweeter. White asparagus, served with a garlic vinaigrette:

For the vinaigrette:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon mustard
1 garlic clove, peeled and grated
S&P 

In a bowl, combine all the ingredients and beat with a fork until you reach an emulsion. 

For the white asparagus:
A handful of white asparagus, harder bottom part removed, left whole (you can peel them if you apprehend their fibrous characteristic)
The juice of 1 lemon
1 bunch of rosemary

In a pan, bring water to the boil and add the asparagus, rosemary and the lemon juice. Cook until tender to taste. Serve the asparagus with a drizzle of vinaigrette on top. 

Vinegar stings my tongue, resist, a setback of velvety olive oil, resilience. 

Margaux

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My debut novel, The Yellow Kitchen, a story of friendship, food and belonging is out now. If you enjoy The Onion Papers, please consider hitting the subscribe button below and feel free to share this newsletter with anyone who might enjoy it. Thank you, à bientôt!