There is no better season for eating than late fall and early winter. With the early harvests of asparagus, radishes, and heads of romaine lettuce, spring has its pleasures, but they have a fleeting nature, disappearing as quickly as they come, often consumed between one bit of busy-ness and the next. Summer’s culinary delights often get lost in the gluttony of the moment—does any vegetable more embody the concept of gluttony than a vine ripe tomato? But fall’s foods settle in, with staying power, for the long haul of winter.
Winter provides time to get to know the food, rather than taste it and move on. A recipe that works well can be enjoyed again and again, fine-tuned and re-tuned. Shorter days necessarily lighten the workload, or at least change its pace since we no longer rush to beat an eight o’clock dusk to mow the lawn or weed the carrots; supper arrives in a proper veil of darkness.
It begins with the first harvest of storage onions in August, when the days have already begun to shorten. In a few short weeks, a change to cool nights signals that squash is ready to harvest. First frost sends us rushing to check the Brussels sprouts, which taste lousy without a good frost (our sprout crop is running very late this year, and should be ready for the next box—they taste good, but aren’t sized up yet). When the kale has frozen solid in early December, the cold-weather eating season has not quite reached its midpoint. And even as the earliest spring harvests begin, we still (we hope!) reach into the root cellar for the last of the storage crops harvested months before.
Spring and summer’s delights are not passively awaited, they are rushed along with row covers and transplanting and raised beds and anything else we can do. We await fall’s crops more passively; the short days that signal crops to slow down or stop growing, the cool nights and fall frosts that deepen and enrich the flavors cannot be rushed—we can only wait. Like a
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