and served with Hollandaise sauce, White sauce, melted butter or most recently with olive oil and Parmesan cheese. Tall, narrow asparagus cooking pots allow the shoots to be steamed gently, their tips staying out of the water. During the German Spargelsaison or Spargelzeit ("asparagus season" or "asparagus time"), the asparagus season that traditionally finishes on 24 June, roadside stands and open-air markets sell about half of the country's white asparagus consumption. In western Himalayan regions, such as Nepal and north-western India wild asparagus is harvested as a seasonal vegetable delicacy known as Kurilo or Jhijhirkani. Effects on urine The effect of eating asparagus on urine excreted afterwards has long been observed: [Asparagus] cause a powerful and disagreeable smell in the urine, as everybody knows. — Treatise of All Sorts of Foods, Louis Lémery, 1702 asparagus... affects the urine with a foetid smell (especially if cut when they are white) and therefore have been suspected by some physicians as not friendly to the kidneys; when they are older, and begin to ramify, they lose this quality; but then they are not so agreeable. — "An Essay Concerning the Nature of Aliments", John Arbuthnot, 1735 A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreeable Odour... — "Letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels", Benjamin Franklin, c. 1781 Asparagus "...transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume." — Marcel Proust (1871–1922) Asparagus contains asparagusic acid. When the vegetable is digested, a group of volatile sulfur-containing compounds is produced. Asparagus has been eaten and cultivated for at least two millennia but the association between odorous urine and asparagus consumption was not observed until the late 17th century when sulfur-rich fertilisers became common in agriculture. Small-scale studies noted that the "asparagus urine" odour was not produced by all individuals and estimates as to the proportion of the population who are excretors (reporting a noticeable asparagus urine odour after eating asparagus) has ranged from about 40% to as high as 79%. When excretors are exposed to non-excretor urine after asparagus consumption, however, the characteristic asparagus urine odour is usually reported. More recent work has confirmed that a small proportion of individuals do not produce asparagus urine, and amongst those that do, some cannot detect the odour due to a single-nucleotide polymorphism within a cluster of olfactory receptors. Debate exists about the universality of producing the sulfurous smell, as well as the ability to