Bounty - crops in the Northeast - Delectations

National Review, Sept 26, 1994 by Linda Bridges

SUMMERTIME, and the livin' ain't easy, at least for anyone much south of Great Slave Lake. But as we try to balance how much air-conditioning we can afford against how much heat we can stand, there is one consolation: hazy, hot, and humid weather with lots of rain may be uncomfortable for humans, but it's evidently great for tomatoes and corn and blackberries and even lettuce.

Two years ago here in the Northeast we enjoyed a delightfully cool summer in which nothing ever really ripened. Last year, a wretched Bermuda High squatted in one place for two whole months, keeping the Midwest flooded and the East Coast parched; our tomatoes were shriveled little things, whereas the Midwestern ones, in John Coyne's sardonic account, were big and heavy--and resolutely green. But this summer we had August-quality tomatoes by mid July, and barring an unseasonable frost they should keep coming for another two months, yielding their full quota of mozzarella and tomatoes, tomato and basil salad, marinara sauce to put up for the winter, salade nicoise, and the dozens of other wonderful dishes from the northern coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas.

Last year the lettuce, chard, and spinach looked like lacework; this year it's full and lush, in a multitude of varieties you won't see in your supermarket, or at any rate not in mine. Devotees have to go to country farmstands, big-city greenmarkets, or their own gardens for firm, slightly bitter green Waldman, which pairs beautifully in a salad with mild Red Oak Leaf, or for soft, mild green Simpson, which goes especially well with the wittily crinkled Lola Rossa, or the smooth, dark, slightly bitter Red Flame or Red Sails. Then there are lettuces that are available year round--but in very different forms. If the hot weather makes you crave olives and anchovies, the romaine is ready for a Greek salad, firm and juicy and not very much like its winter (or supermarket) cousin. Arugula, anyone? You can home in on it from five paces by the aroma alone, even if there is basil competing for the olfactory airspace. And though purists may frown, if your idea of the perfect green salad includes thin slices of radish and scallion (and if your idea of delightful meal preparation includes munching a couple of each while you work), well, it's a buyer's market. From the delicate thinnings of late spring to the full-grown versions of August, when scallions are so big they can be mistaken for leeks, they have been a delight.

Each to his own purism. I don't keep a fully seasonal kitchen; in January I will grumble but now and then buy an overpriced, underripe tomato from Holland or Israel.

But not corn. No matter how much I might yearn for it in June, I have learned to be patient and wait until Samascott Orchards from up North brings it to the Union Square Greenmarket in late July.

Corn is one foodstuff concerning which agricultural science seems to have had the consumer rather than the distributor or retailer in mind. The old rule was: Pick your corn no more than ten minutes before it is to go into the pot; otherwise the sugar will convert into starch, and before you know it your corn has turned into pig feed. Indeed, in a passage I've seen attributed to Mark Twain (although Twain aficionado Bill Rickenbacker couldn't place it), the following recipe was given: Build a fire at the edge of your corn patch, and heat a cauldron of water to boiling. Pick the requisite number of ears as fast as you can, sprint back to the fire, husk them, cook them, and eat them.

But several of the newish hybrids (my favorite, which Samascott identifies only as "Bicolor," has both white and yellow kernels) resist turning starchy. By the time I get my corn on the table, it has been off the plant nearly twenty hours. And yet it's deliciously sweet, but with a full, rich corn flavor (which, to my taste, the very sweet white corns such as Silver Queen tend to lack). Even a greedy person will feel no need to overdo the butter.

Of course, summer--even this summer--isn't all a bin of corn. It is one of life's ironies that some of the great fruits for pies--gooseberries, currants, sweet cherries--have their brief season during precisely the three or four weeks when you least want to light the oven. But it would seem ungrateful not to make at least one pie (with a real lattice crust, please--if you've never tried one, you'll be amazed at how extra-flaky are the upper portions of the pastry strips). Fortunately, though, the English invented some great desserts that require only a couple of minutes gentle cooking on top of the stove--gooseberry fool, for example, where the fruit is lightly mashed and mixed with whipped cream; or summer pudding, in which white bread is ingeniously used in place of pie crust, to soak up the juices of whatever combination of berries you want to use. The English food writer Jane Grigson suggests mixing red currants with raspberries and/or blackberries.

Meanwhile, as the weather steams, I find it helps to remember in detail, finger by frozen finger, how cold I was last January on the Ram's Head chair-lift at Killington. And to reflect that while spring and autumn are the most beautiful seasons, it isn't they that feed us. Indeed, the restaurateur Nicola Paone tells me that the Italians, devoted both to cultivated produce and to wild game, have a proverb: "Without summer and winter, we'd have nothing to eat."