Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Harvest Moon

September moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

Happy New Harvest Moon! The moon is new tonight at 8:11pm west coast time, 11:11 on the east coast. We're moving into the Harvest Moon, when the full moon (on the 21st) falls nearest to the day of the autumnal equinox (the 22nd). Because of some astronomy I don't fully understand, the Harvest Moon is both especially bright and low in the sky; and it shines all through the night, from sundown to sunup the next day. It does this for a number of days around the full moon. Long ago, this meant that farmers and peasants could labor late into the night -- after sunset if they needed to -- harvesting the fruits of a year's worth of work.

We have come to associate harvest with the industrious activities of our agrarian great grandparents: grains being reaped and threshed and put into storage. Root cellars filled with vegetables: potatoes, carrots, onions, beets, turnips, radishes, pumpkins, cabbages. Hay being stacked for animal feed. Nuts gathered, corn dried, cucumbers pickled, berries jammed. Apples being pressed into cider, then fermented. And, of course, kitchensfull of busy women canning summer's bounty.

Canning is actually a relatively recent technology. It was developed by a Frenchman in around 1800, and grew in popularity throughout the 19th century. But humankind had been preserving the harvest's vegetables for millennia by that time, through a natural process of lacto-fermentation, which pickles them in a combination of salt and the lactic acid in their own juices. The earliest record we have of this is of Chinese workers building the Great Wall and eating fermented mixed vegetables in the 3rd Century BCE. It is a process that was developed all over the world, using different produce and different methodologies, depending on the climate, the flora, and the local landscape.

In Northern Europe, communities would dig huge pits, line them with wooden boards, and fill them with salted cabbage which they would pound with feet or wooden clubs to release juices, then cover and let ferment, making sauerkraut. Pacific Islanders dug pits and lined them with banana leaves, and there fermented breadfruit, bananas, plantains, or roots. Almost every culture has its distinctive lacto-fermented vegetables: Koreans developed the celebrated kimchee. Egyptians pickle carrots, cucumbers, turnips, cauliflower, olives, onions and peppers. They serve these pickles with virtually every meal. In India, limes, mangoes and radishes are just a few of their common traditional pickles.

The preservation of the harvest is only the most obvious reason for these culinary traditions. People also found that these foods were more digestible than they were raw, and seemed to have medicinal properties not found in the vegetable by itself. Interesting new layers of flavors developed, and complex combinations could be developed of sour, salty, sweet, spicy, and even stinky. Some found that the fermented vegetables helped them digest the richer foods in their diets, and began to combine sauerkraut with sausages, cornichons with pâté, kimchee with roasted meat, chutneys with curry, pickled ginger with sushi. While canning tends to reduce nutrient content, kill enzymes, and dilute flavor, lacto-fermentation increases nutrient content, encourages enzymes, and enhances flavor.

I am fascinated by these traditional pickles, the way they link people to their cultural history, to the landscape of their native place, to each other through communal processing, to the season and the realities of time and temperature. And I am fascinated by the way they taste. Growing up, I always hated pickles, and picked them off my plate -- they tasted sickly sour and sweet to me. But now that I am making my own using this traditional process, I love them. They are still sour, but the flavor is more subtle -- like the difference between a homemade broth and a dissolved bullion cube... An Indian cauliflower pickle, a pickled salsa... each new experiment intrigues me with its layers of flavor -- no longer fresh, but now rich and deep. I hope to keep exploring this process with many harvests to come.

Origins of the word "harvest" are somewhat obscure, but it comes from the Old English word hoerfest; which is akin to the Old High German word, herbist. While to us 'harvest' denotes the bounty of the fields and the labor of its gathering and preserving, in the old english and old german its meaning was simply, "autumn." Even today, autumn in German is Herbst; in Dutch it is herfst. I find it interesting that the season and the activity were once so inseparable that only one word was needed. Today, our strongest associations with autumn are the turning color of the leaves, and the time to go back to school... but in early European culture, it meant one simple but profound thing -- the reenactment of a timeless drama -- the miracle of human beings gathering sustenance from the living earth.

Fall has always been my favorite time of year. I loved it growing up on the east coast, with its breathtaking colors and the growing chill. But I love it here on the west coast, too, though the change is more subtle: a shift in the light, a frisson of expectancy entering the air and hovering. Spring is the classic season for amorousness, for the birds and the bees and the rituals of mating...

But I fall in love in the autumn. It is the season when everything seems possible, and I have that heightened sense of the goodness and preciousness of being alive, and the impulse to seize the day and throw caution to the autumn wind.

Or maybe I just love the produce. Of course everyone loves summer's bounty: the tomatoes, exploding with juice and sweetness and a dazzling array of colors, feisty peppers, oozing melons, glossy eggplant, sweet sweet corn. It is not hard to get anyone to eat a tray of sliced perfect tomatoes, layered with basil and mozzarella and a fruity olive oil. Everyone loves this. But the romance of autumnal produce is a subtler thing. I love it the way you notice the shy bass player behind the showy, charismatic lead singer in a band. Everyone knows a melon is sexy, but how many find a butternut squash irresistible? To me, there is nothing more alluring than the growing assortment of autumn's pumpkins: delicata, acorn, butternut, kabocha, fairytale. And for all my love of juicy green beans, I secretly covet the piles of drying shelling beans, like the cranberry beans: speckled red and white pods withering, full of potential, waiting to be pulled away. They hearken to a time when many hands would move together, in a circle, gently rocking, shelling the beans for supper.

This week at the farmer's market I glimpsed the first of the winter squash: delicata and then, right on its heels, butternut. And I know the time is coming for a dish I like to make at this time of year. I can only make it once, because to make it from local, seasonal produce I have to catch the perfect moment. Sweet potatoes, butternut squash, carrots, potatoes, corn, tomatoes and red peppers all have to be ripe at the same time. It is a fleeting instant. I think of it as a harvest stew, because the starchy vegetables cook with wheat berries, barley, and white beans into a delicious thickness, with little wheels of corn on the cob studded throughout, in the beautiful hues of orange and yellow and cream so expressive of autumn. It is topped by a sofrito of cooked tomatoes and red peppers, which is fiery red, and a sprinkle of scallions. I love it. It is actually a variation of the classic Argentine dish, Locro. I've put a recipe up on my recipes page, in case you want to make it. It is the essence of earthiness, the essence of autumn.

Some readers have made disappointed noises that I don't include more recipes in my emails, attributing this to a coyness and protectiveness about my culinary secrets. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have no culinary secrets, and the idea of proprietary formulas for foods offends my sensibilities somehow, like the notion of patenting seeds. All recipes grow out of other people's recipes, and I am not nearly so interested in originality as I am in tradition. The trouble is simply this: I often cook intuitively, and I don't write anything down. So unless I've followed someone else's recipe (as is the case with the Locro), I simply don't have one. My partner will sometimes lament, if I happen to serve something particularly toothsome, 'did you write it down this time??', and I have to answer, 'no.' It is a bit like a Tibetan sand mandala. You have to enjoy it while it's there, because it never will be again -- it's this moment, this now, and then it's gone.

Enjoy the Harvest season. Make pickles; make stew; revel in the sweet seduction of autumn; harvest or make hay by the light of the full moon.