Asparagus in Moscow gardens since the 17th century and Russian distrust of lettuce

Asparagus was loved and cultivated in Russia, even in Moscow, from the seventeenth century at the latest. The German Olearius recalls: “There are also kitchen vegetables of every kind, especially asparagus as thick as a finger, such as I myself ate at the house of a certain Dutch merchant, a friend of mine in Moscow.” Nina Molева also describes succulent white asparagus in the Moscow kitchen gardens in spring, and asparagus was still a common plant in Moscow vegetable plots as late as the 1920s. But “lettuce and other kinds of salad were never planted by the Russians; they formerly paid no attention to them at all, and not only did not eat them, but even laughed at the Germans for eating them, saying that they eat grass. Now, however, some of them too are beginning to try salad" in the early seventeenth century.

A painting of 1697 by the Dutchman Adriaen Coorte.