Autumn on the Way

I'm back to Greenvalley from last week's business trip. Autumn crept into town while I was away.

This morning I was up early for the Santa Monica Farmers Market and while there are still tomatoes and eggplant and all that summertime gang, now there are also pears, apples, grapes, and fresh dates. I'll admit that I wasn't entirely surprised.

In San Francisco last week, I couldn't escape the sense that summer's reign is over. Even if Labor Day still hasn't arrived and even if, in California at least, it's still hot as damnation, the days are noticeably shorter. Other indications from the orchard, the garden and the woods—and my own gut—say more than the thermometer or calendar.

If I'm suddenly hungry for substantial meals and complex flavors, it must be fall. Like fruits trees and game birds and everything that lives, humans respond to sunlight, so it must be the year's shifting solar patterns that cause our deepest instinctual being to crave different foods in different seasons.

In the fall, I want something dense with nutrients, calories and flavor: game birds, rabbits and roasts; baked tubers and stewed dark greens; gutsy gamay and pinot noir wines with their heady fruit wrapped around a black core of mineral earth.

Just weeks ago, all I wanted was corn and green beans and grilled fish and cool, light wines. The other night at Zuni Cafe, I ordered squab roasted in the woodfire oven with plums and drank with it a funky Beajoulais Villages from Chateau Prety. The next night at Chez Panisse it was grilled duck breast with roasted grapes with a bottle of Sonoma Coast pinot noir. Another day at lunch, I ordered braised lamb, for heaven's sake, because the other offering at the divine little Bar Jules, salmon with green beans, seemed suddenly too—what?—insubstantial.

Tastes change throughout the season because, I believe, solar light alerts our survivalist instinct to prepare physiologically and even psychologically for the season ahead. In March I crave green things because the chlorophyl and vitamins are tonic against the misery of late winter and a preparation for the lusty physical exertions of lengthening spring days. In September, I want meat and baked fruit because the wealth of protein and sugar will pad my internal organs against the cold and deprivation of late winter. Autumn is a fat and merry time, but it won't last.

I understand that today the seasons are largely notional, at least from a survival point of view, because of the ubiquity of electricity and all it's made possible. But technological modernity has been too brief a phenomenon to overturn the human inheritance of instinct and habit acquired over thousands of generations. If I'm hungry for calories now, it's because our ancestors who survived winters past had prepared themselves by gorging on calories late in the annual growing season.

And that's where the sun says we are now, even in California.

***

At the market I got grapes and pears, plus a batch of the most remarkably delicious fresh Medjool dates from Daval. They were so moist they left a damp spot behind on the table. I've never seen dates like them before.

Driving home, I started to put things together in my mind: pear butter sweetened with honey is one idea, grape jelly with thyme leaves and balsamic vinegar another. The dates are a quandary: in a sense, they're already preserved or at least self-preserving. But don't you think they would make an incredible jam for New Year's Eve? Perhaps they want to be combined with figs, which are also still in abundance.

I'm going into the kitchen now—off to the LA County Fair later. I'll report back.

Comments

[Anonymous]

Just a quick question:

I noticed that most of your preserves or jams do not call for any type of pectin. Does this mean they have to go in the fridge, or is there enough natural pectin to allow them to be safely canned without it?

[Diana]

Grape with thyme would be good, but apple with thyme is amazing. In England many years ago, I bought a jar of apple/thyme jelly called "Scrumper's Reward." Scrumpers, it turns out, are people who fruit from apple orchards. It was pure heaven, so ever since, I only make apple jelly with thyme in it!