Seasons and Seasoning

The first summer squash, tomatoes and peaches are making their appearance this beautiful May morning at the market.

As we have often indicated in these posts, since we moved to Davis and started shopping at the farmer’s market, we’ve found that we mostly shop and eat seasonally: that is, we eat whatever is in season at the time.  We never made a conscious decision to do this; we just fell into it.  And we certainly never feel it as an obligation.  

For that matter,  eating in season might almost be said to be the less “natural” choice nowadays, if one considers our real society as our habitat.  Davis also has supermarkets where you can get pretty much any fruit or vegetable all the time.  So eating in season might be thought to be an act of abstention by which one deliberately limits or curtails an available abundance.

We find it is otherwise.  But why?

A stand-up comedian we like, Pete Holmes, does a bit about the sandwich shop Subway, where, he says, “everything tastes the same: it all tastes the way the restaurant smells, that vague, cardboard, sawdust smell…”

(You can hear it at:

http://soundcloud.com/bullseye-with-jesse-thorn/pete-holmes-subway)

It’s a really funny performance, but considered like this, out of context and in the cold light of day, isn’t it remarkable to think how profoundly we have impoverished ourselves and our senses — especially given the abundance of material things that surround us? 

We make this point to suggest why there is no restraint, but rather something positively pleasurable about waiting for the season.  It is to live with a whole calendar of smells and tastes: a progress from green garlic to winter garlic, from asparagus to zucchini, from fava beans to tomatoes, and so forth.

We wait for the season to buy and cook, and then when we cook we also season the food.  The word “season,” as a noun referring to a certain time of year, descends from the Latin serere, to sow.  It's easy to imagine people a long time ago being intensely concerned about identifying the right time to sow and reap.   As a verb meaning (as the Oxford English Dictionary gives it), “To render (a dish) more palatable by the addition of some savoury ingredient,” season descends from the Old French “saisonner” (itself a distant cousin of serere), but now taken as meaning “to ripen.”  The word itself thus seems to encompass a certain rhythm of sowing and ripening, of planting and fruition.  The food ripens in the field in the proper season and then it ripens in your pan with a touch of seasoning.

Today we put some fresh shelled English peas, carrots and a few chopped spring onions in a pan with some butter and a little water.  We cooked them covered at low heat until almost tender.  Then we reduced the liquid to a glaze, and seasoned with salt, pepper and some chopped mint from the garden.  Perfectly simple seasoning for the simple abundance of the season.