Hi there. I’m a refugee from a doctoral program in American history. My field was culinary history. There have been lots of good answers upthread.
Remember, even if a woman did notice that the asparagus tasted good when it was just lightly cooked, she probably wouldn’t dare serve it that way, because everybody would be like “what the heck is this?”
Yes, “digestability” was a HUGE concern for people in the past. They knew very little about either disease or nutrition. As I’m sure a lot of you know, many of womens’ health and mental problems were incorrectly attributed to some vague malfunctioning of the female parts. Similarly, many problems of people of both genders were blamed on the digestive system. So there you go.