Good luck, babe!
Zucchini and the romance of seasonality
Welcome back. I’m Adrienne, and you’re reading the Local Technique newsletter from New York, where it’s late July and zucchini season is upon us.
This is either a blessing or a curse, depending on what you want from zucchini and what they want from you. If you’ve ever had access to a patch of ground and have planted Cucurbita pepo in the hopes of harvesting a cute and manageable supply of summer squash to support your weekend grilling goals, you’ve probably watched in horror as the organism transformed from polite seedling to vampire squid, pursuing its alien agenda with no regard for your mood board or plans.
Like any relationship, it’s all romance in the beginning. Flowers. Tendrils. Stamens and pistils, leaves unfurling in the dew. Then overnight, The Change: an explosion of need, tentacles spreading in every direction, a monster intent on imprisoning you in the kitchen, sending you pics you can’t unsee. So. Many. Zucchini. This is obscene. How did our love end up like this?
It might be heresy to point this out in a newsletter about cooking from the soil, but the seasonal tide of abundance, like most of nature, is not always on our side. If you’re steeped in 24/7 advertising and other consumer propaganda (i.e., if you’re American, online), you’d be forgiven for believing that seasonality is about being showered with the treats we deserve at the times we deserve them. Let’s blame Chef’s Table on Netflix and the wedding-industrial complex for a good part of that, for blasting us with so much Vivaldi that we can’t escape connecting the four seasons to a life of sophisticated consumption and affluent ease.
In reality, seasonality is sublime. I mean sublime in the Gothic sense: where knowing the power of the seasons up close means feeling the tiny insignificance of our wild and precious lives all the way down to our cells. Being sublime, which is what the seasons do, means giving an overwhelming sense of awe-inducing beauty and terror. It’s not that they’re trying to kill us; it’s that they wouldn’t care if they did. Hurricanes, avalanches, floods, the flu: all seasonal. Lack of food was horribly seasonal for hundreds of thousands of years, until we finally invented horticulture to improve our odds of surviving the flux of each year.
Yet every human with good taste in food seems to believe that observing the flow of the seasons is sacred, that we ought to cherish it like an heirloom or a pet, that seasonal abundance is an enchanting, undeniable good — as if the only challenge is to stretch our time and money to infinity so that we have enough leisure to enjoy every fresh offering at the exact moment it peaks.
Maybe it’s the dopamine talking. Where I live, a warm tomato straight off the vine on a sunny day in August tastes like euphoria, a glimpse of actual heaven. A tomato from the refrigerator ship of a global conglomerate in January tastes like a fifth state of matter, a substance so unnatural our brains haven’t invented the chemicals yet to describe its particular brand of hell.
Therein may lie the true awesomeness of seasonality. Not that the seasons create easy abundance but that surfing their ebb and flow can shepherd us to a state of agony or ecstasy that’s hard to reach and all the higher (or lower) for it. If I could carry the euphoria of a perfect bite from meal to meal forever, would that be The Good Life? Up for debate, but when it hits it hits, in a way not much else does.
So who does all the work that brings the endorphins to the table?
The standard American version of the seasonal food story says that the hero is the consumer. Policy and markets and the environment may fail, but a series of correct choices will lead us to whatever good we collectively seek: shop well and maximum happiness (or its relatives: wellness, sustainability, longevity) will follow.
Here in the Local Technique newsletter I’d like to offer you a different take: a version where the story of seasonality is a giant dance and the heroes are the dancers. This is not the type of story we usually tell in American food media, with our national appetite for myths about individuals who chose so exceptionally they ended up on top: the founder, the chef, the winner, the savior, the boss. I don’t mean to rag on America (I’m from here, I live here, I love you, I’m sorry!), I just mean to say there’s another way to see things: soften your gaze and you’ll start to notice so many movements and dimensions to seasonality that you might forget the idea that there was ever supposed to be a top at all.
Producing, preparing and consuming seasonal food means more than shopping. It means navigating relationships that exist in perpetual motion with one another — supply and demand, soil and air, policy and charity, interspecies desire and care — and the pattern is so intertwined that you can’t pull one thread too far without unraveling the whole sweater. One force pushes, another pulls, another ripples in and out. If we’re lucky we get a role in the drama; we get to dance among the threads.
In this newsletter, our role is to be cooks, and as cooks we’re always chasing some version of peak flavor. Seasonality alone doesn’t guarantee flavor, but it’s a dimension of it, like time is a dimension of reality or timbre a dimension of sound. What does that make flavor then? I don’t think we can say what it is, but we can say what it does: flavor lets us know that someone — maybe a cook, maybe a farmer, maybe someone in between — has danced particularly well. That’s it. It’s truth we can taste. We feel it without understanding. When we bite into a perfect tomato (or aged cheddar or blackcurrant crisp or incredible salsa verde, or take a sip of a living glass of wine or cider or tea), all we know is yeah, it’s here. Some part of the dance is happening right on time.
In Brooklyn that time is Zapallito del Tronco o’clock. How this member of the zucchini family made its way from Argentina to the Hudson Valley to the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket on summer Saturdays is a tale of twists and turns too complicated to tell. But it’s here, it’s delicious, and we’re going to take this opportunity to frizzle it in olive oil with feta and a little dried mint from the mountains of Greece…
Illustration by Adrienne Anderson.