The best thing about August is that the next month is September. August is why summer holidays and the Hamptons were invented. We don’t take summer holidays. And we have no beach house. We have the terrace, the roof, and the city.
In early August the humidity of summer melts the city’s populous collection of islands and rivers and waterways into a fractious and heat-damp mass. High above the grid, mountains of clouds pass on their way to the ocean, dwarfing the skyline and leaving it behind. When they pause above us, the rain they let loose is thick and fast and pins the streets in place. The sky joins with the rushing gutters and running streets. Afterward, for an hour or more, the air lifts, and is breathable.
We decided to reconnoiter Green-Wood Cemetery in August, thirsty for green on a hazy Sunday. Green-Wood’s hills, rare in Brooklyn, can be seen from our roof, to the southeast. Beneath its trees, old and heavily leafed, shade is a dark, constant presence before autumn touches the oaks, beeches, and maples gorgeously. The R train takes us underground to 4th Avenue in Sunset Park, and a two block walk uphill puts us at Green-Wood’s ornate gates guarding a mounded expanse of clipped lawn.
The crests of the green hills reveal unencumbered views of more green hills stippled with old stone headstones in a space that seems otherworldly and endless. The trees are revealed to be some of the most beautiful in the city. We stop and sit in the private shade of an old catalpa, its leaves like limp cloth, its branches arched toward the grass, and eat our sandwich picnic. Green monk parrots flit, screeching in faraway treetops, brief highlights against the varied and textured greens. The flowering panicles of tree hydrangeas are a foxed white beside the pale angels and weathered stones. We sit quietly, refugees seeking green. As we finish our lunch Vincent points to a low brown shape moving confidently through the short grass. It is a large and sleek groundhog, grazing contentedly and pausing often to sniff and inspect, undisturbed and unworried in his country.
All afternoon a storm has been gathering in the west over Jersey and an hour later it is above us, the air motionless, the light of its arrival sending the trees deep into relief, bringing the blurred edges of the summer day into sudden contrast. We turn back early as a violent downdraft shakes the branches around us, the storm bursting, the warm water emptying from the sky like arrows. We arrive at the subway with our clothes flapping wetly against our legs, cameras wrapped in anything we can spare. On the train dry passengers reassess the weather after glancing at us as briefly and impassively as only New Yorkers can. Hm, you can see them thinking, Rain.
In the interests of foraging, mid-month, we head out to Dead Horse Bay to find the beach plums whose blossoms filled me with anticipation in the spring. As we wait for the train at Borough Hall, sweat collects in the small of my back. The subway car is a refrigerated heaven. Surfacing on Flatbush Avenue, the heat is a new shock. Within minutes we are on a bus, cool as cucumbers again. It is filled with a New York cross section of beachgoers. Black, beige, brown, tattooed, skinny, fat, cool, indifferent, all armed with bags of towels and coolers of drinks. The bus drops the two of us in the middle of nowhere and carries its crowd to the Far Rockaways, leaving us to tramp into the anonymous bushes.
The first thing I see is ripe wild black cherries. Dark and glistening, strung like pearls on each side of a central stalk, they are unexpected and everywhere. I have never seen so many. They are sweet and bitter and wonderful for jam. If there are no beach plums, these are the compensation. Beside the wide paths the wild lettuce of spring is now five feet tall and in bloom, the thick leaves inedibly bitter. I find the field where I saw the plums and bushwhack my way through waist high milkweed and high summer growth. It is a new country, barely recognizable, and the beach plums have been obliterated by a tangle of invasive vines. The fruit I can see is tiny and pockmarked. I retrace my steps to the waiting Frenchman who is deeply suspicious of lurking poison ivy. Back at the cherries I strip handfuls into my brown paper packets and collect several pounds’ worth. We walk down to the beach and I pick some heads of fresh, sticky staghorn sumac, to submerge in vodka and drink in December. On the cooler and windy beach, littered with broken glass from the last century and plastic from ours, the prolific sea rocket has set seed and I collect some of these too, to turn into pickles. The water of Jamaica Bay is the color of mud and the sky above it white without relief. A windsurfer whips over the dull chop on his board.
Back in the concrete bowels of Brooklyn, cultivated plums are streaming into farmers’ markets and collecting in purple, red, and yellow mounds. At the height of the growing season the tables are buried beneath fruit and vegetables. I buy too much, unable to resist the glossy purple curves of eggplant, one each of a dozen varieties of heirloom tomatoes, boxes of fat blueberries. Cosmos and zinnias and sunflowers packed into buckets are carried aloft by shoppers like prizes. Bruisable white peaches have arrived. I collect them very carefully. The air above their table hums with the scent of their juice. Signs exhort shoppers to eat entire yellow peaches before deciding whether to buy. Produce needs to be sold. Gluts demand consumption. I turn into an instant and reverent vegetarian and buy more ears of corn than we can eat in a sitting.
At home, I stand over the sink, slurping my first white peach, its sweetness flooding me with my childhood.
A beautiful, peppery-sour mix for cocktails.
For a virgin version, cover the sumac with plain water and strain it through muslin the next day. Sweeten to taste and drink as you would lemonade. This can also be reduced (without sugar) to use in cooking as you might tamarind syrup or lemon juice. Store in the fridge.
SERVES TWO 
2 heads fresh staghorn sumac
1/3 cup (65 g) sugar
1 bottle good vodka (I use Stolichnaya)
Break the sumac into florets and cut off as much of the green stems as you can reach. Do not rinse the sumac or you will lose the sour coating that is its charm.
Place the sticky sumac in a large jar, add the sugar, and pour the vodka in to cover. Seal. Swirl and tilt the jar to dissolve the sugar. The intensely sour sumac will flavor the vodka within days, but I strain mine off after 2 weeks, pouring the alcohol through 2 layers of muslin to strain out any fine hairs from the sumac. Store in a decanter where you can enjoy the gorgeous glowing amber color of the alcohol.
Month of drama in the sky. August is moody. Days and nights when the air outside is like hot, sodden cotton wool alternate with brief transparencies of blue sky that offer a subliminal taste of autumn on their edges. Hurricane season is in the offing, and even New York is brushed by storms’ outer bands as weakening systems whirl up the coast at full throttle.
The herbs on the edge of the terrace have become an uninterrupted mass of scented texture, interlocked and meshed into a lush, buzzing forest. Moss roses open early and fold by midday, their shock of color bright against the strawberries whose long stems leave the red fruit hanging over the edge of their pots. Above them, clouds billow like whipped cream.
The lemon basil, more delicate and heat sensitive than the rest, blooms first as I give up nipping out its buds. I keep its flower-studded spires for the bees, which bend the stems with their constant attention. The Thai basil on tall purple stems reaches its peak. Butterflies alight on the calamintha flowers and festoon the long-blooming agastache. I count more species than I have seen at one time: skippers, cabbage whites, painted ladies, monarchs, and moths. Bees and bright flies, unidentified and zooming, touch my hands lightly as my fingers interfere with their work, picking leaves for our supper while they collect their own.
On the parsley and the fennel the results of the eastern tiger swallowtail’s July egg laying appear. Caterpillars have emerged, striped and voracious. Despite their velvet beauty, I remain unamused, relocating some to one parsley plant they may decimate, and giving the rest flying lessons. Whee!
The main crop of figs is ripe at last, exactly when the purple clematis reblooms after its summer haircut. I collect a bowlful, trying to admire the fruit respectfully for a few hours before wolfing the lot in one sitting. I restrain myself and save most of them for a simple supper of paper-thin prosciutto and the halved fruit. In the following days I pick the remainder and we eat them with our tomatoes, a strange and good combination with mint and basil from the terrace. And then it is over. No more figs for a year. Just like that.
Heeding wind or hurricane warnings, we remove all the pots from the terrace edge in case some flying object dislodges one and sends it past the catchnet of the wide gutter to the courtyard below. The effort is backbreaking—lifting the pots and placing them on the terrace floor, and then doing it all in reverse when the threat has passed; but worse are the summer slugs that appear. When unfamiliar pots invade their leafy domain the hitherto hidden slugs discover new grazing grounds (strawberries! basil!). Beer traps are prepared. I am surprised by the number of bodies I collect, and a little sorry. But not very.
It rains. It starts loud and drums on the skylights, somewhere after midnight. I think of water washing horizontally some feet above us, heading for the gutters, pooling in the low corner. As the storms sit overhead, I am up on the roof in the wee hours as something metallic rolls around, loose. In the tugging, warm wind and water I find nothing and disappear down the hatch again, closing it behind me.
It rains while I stand on the terrace wrapped in a sodden kikoi, emptying water from the braai’s huge copper bowl, before flipping it upside down, to collect no more. It rains while we have breakfast. It rains all day.
And then it stops. Now, dry air, tugging wind, a collapsed New Dawn rose. I spend an afternoon on the roof, searching for weak spots, patching a suspect area with black cement, checking the gutter, and then moving on to more interesting things, like deadheading the shattered roses. As the day grows, the humidity returns, smothering us gradually with that old August feeling.
Escaping to the roof farm, I find long purple and fat white eggplants hanging below furred, spiked leaves. Black peppers are bursting from plants grown from seed. The first ground cherries are sweet inside their papery husks and rustle as I pluck them. Blueberries are ripe.
The little Yellow Pear tomatoes are so prolific that they threaten to topple their pot, which I wedge more securely. I find the first red Brandywine and gloat over my beautiful Green Zebras. The tomatoes’ leaves are turning blighty but I am used to this. The fruit will still ripen. The Cherokee Purple and Black Krim fatten with juice and I eat them one evening when I am home alone. Two slices of brown bread slathered with mayonnaise, salt and pepper, the thick slices of tomato. August has its upside, and it lives in the juice of these, the best tasting tomatoes I have known. I will never forget this sandwich, nor the one I made the next night, with applewood-smoked bacon. I thought I knew how to eat, but it took this tiny farm on a rented roof in a big, big city to teach me the very basics:
First, catch your tomato.
Late in the month we eat our picnic supper on the roof—our tomatoes and our figs and our own grilled peppers with anchovies, with fresh bread. An electric chorus of cicadas rises to shimmering fever pitch in the trees in the back gardens ahead of us and the oaks behind, on the street, before receding in an exhausted wave, ending in a single, despondent click. We stay late, sipping wine and watching the sky firing its sunset changes in vivid parallel bands of high cloud in the west.
The light disorients me. It does not belong to summer. Times have changed, despite our vigilance. The season is slipping. Our eyes wander with the lights of a long barge heading slowly toward the East River, and we remain lost in thought, thinking of other waterways and other lights, and other possible lives waiting to be lived.
This quintessential summer soup varies every time I make it, depending on what is on hand and what grows up top.
SERVES TWO, OR FOUR AS AN APPETIZER
4 medium ripe tomatoes
1 medium cucumber, peeled and seeded
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 red onion
1/2 red pepper
2 teaspoons sherry or red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
8 basil leaves
1/2 cup (20 g) torn bread pieces (optional)
2 tablespoons olive oil (optional)
Bring a pot of water to a boil. Slit the tops of the tomatoes with a sharp knife and place them in the boiling water for 1 minute. Drain and peel the tomatoes. Remove their woody stem base. Chop the cucumber, garlic, onion, and pepper roughly and place them in a blender. Add the remaining ingredients and blend until smooth. Taste for seasoning and add more salt and pepper if necessary. The flavor should be pungent but well balanced. Chill very well. Serve with a couple of ice cubes in each bowl.
The air conditioner does its expensive job while the terrace shimmers and the roof buckles and pops in the heat. If the air lifts, we head outside and dine again at the stone table. On the bad days we lurk indoors and eat large salads or food that I tend on the fire, separated from it by the insulation of that double-paned glass door.
Butterflied Leg of Lamb with Sour Cream and Garlic
In August of 2003, New York City experienced a spectacular blackout. Stuck in Manhattan on a subway whose first car had just crawled into the station, I emerged to find nothing working. No way home, except to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with thousands of fellow New Yorkers, as cars stood bumper to bumper below us. The day was eerily reminiscent of 9/11 and I was nervous. It was a long, hot walk. I was wearing fancy shoes for a job interview. My feet were blistered when I got home. I went to the freezer and found the ice trays still intact, picked some mint from the window box, and mixed two strong drinks. I carried them downstairs to my neighbor, Constanza Jaramillo, whom I barely knew. We sat at her kitchen table with these drinks in the gathering dusk, and talked, and waited, and became friends.
MAKES ONE DRINK
Mint
2 teaspoons confectioners’ sugar
2 1/2 ounces (5 tablespoons) Cognac
1/2 ounce (1 tablespoon) fresh lemon juice
Sparkling water
Muddle the mint with the sugar in a tall glass. Add the Cognac and lemon juice. Stir. Top with sparkling water and lots of ice. Get to know thy neighbor.
I stumbled upon this combination by accident. I had tomatoes from the roof: Yellow Pear, Black Cherry, Mexican Heirloom, Green Zebra, Black Krim. I had figs (nameless) from the tree. Why not … ? Mint and basil pulled the two together, and we have never looked back.
My rooftop tomatoes have changed the way I shop and cook. Why? Because they changed the way I think. Day in, day out, winter or summer or fall, there are the generic round red tomatoes in grocery stores and supermarkets. I am not fundamentalist about it, but for the most part I am happy to wait for the real deal, to tune my cooking toward what is ripe, and to sate myself once my own small garden and the farmers’ markets start to produce.
SERVES SIX
1 cup (150 g) mixed heirloom cherry tomatoes, cut in half
2 cups (360 g) mixed larger tomatoes, quartered
6 figs, peeled and halved
Salt (not much)
Freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
8 mint leaves, torn or sliced into ribbons
4 sprigs basil, leaves torn at the last minute
Arrange the tomatoes and figs in shallow bowl. Sprinkle salt and pepper over them. Whisk the lemon juice and olive oil and drizzle it over the salad just before serving. Top with the mint and basil leaves.
I have learned to ask for half a leg of lamb, and Pedro Franco, my butcher at Los Paisanos, obliges. If you are forced to buy a whole leg (a considerable investment), use half or even a third, depending on its size, for this butterflied recipe. Keep the rest for a curry or a roast. I take home the cut-up bones, too, and I use these as the base for a stock over which I cook stuffed Greek-style grape leaves. Or you can roast the bones and eat the marrow with a squeeze of lemon juice. But not everyone likes that as much as I do.
Marjoram has a higher, headier note than oregano, but both are surprisingly powerful. By August my marjoram is in bloom and I annoy the bees by using the flowers for this marinade. Rosemary is an obvious match for lamb, and I often use it instead.
SERVES SIX
1/2 leg of lamb (about 3 pounds / 1.3 kg), butterflied
2 cups (480 ml) sour cream
6 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3 tablespoons chopped marjoram or oregano (or 4 sprigs rosemary, needles only)
1/2 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Place the butterflied lamb in a large bowl. Add the sour cream, garlic, herbs, salt, and pepper to taste. Massage the marinade into the lamb with your hands. It will feel funny but it is worth it. The longer you leave it to marinate, the better. I have managed 24 hours, but sometimes only 1 hour. Try for 12.
In good weather, I cook this over a fire. Otherwise, the broiler works very well, though I try hard to avoid it in August. Either way, each side of the meat needs to be exposed to even and high heat for 20 to 25 minutes for pink lamb. This means you need a pretty good fire to begin with, so that it can last. Once the lamb is very brown on both sides, remove it to a platter, cover, and allow the meat to rest for 10 to 15 minutes. The resulting juice is half the pleasure. Sometimes, while the lamb is resting, I toast some good bread over the embers and rub it with a clove of garlic, to sop up that juice. A habit is a habit.
After it has rested, slice the lamb into medium pieces and arrange them on the platter again, drizzling the juice over the top. You will lick your fingers.
Sunday night was kebab night at Anatoli, the beautiful Turkish restaurant, run by my friends Bevan Christie and Mustafa Candan, in Cape Town. Gone were the varying slow stews and melting chops and stuffed vegetables of the week before. Skewers would appear in the glass case to which customers would be guided to choose their main courses, spearing chunks of swordfish with bay leaves, chicken with sumac and chile, spicy ground beef. More importantly, there would be piyaz—a white bean salad spiked with onion, whose vinegary tahini sauce would soak into the delicious, buttery rice that accompanied the kebabs. It is something—and somewhere—I still crave.
SERVES SIX
3 tablespoons tahini
3 tablespoons sherry vinegar
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 cans extra-large white beans, drained
1 small red onion, sliced fairly thin
Powdered sumac, for serving (optional)
Spoon the tahini into a small bowl. Add 3 tablespoons of water, little by little. Stir patiently until blended and smooth. Add the vinegar and stir until the dressing is pourable, but not watery. Add salt and pepper to taste. The salt brings out the best in the onion and counters the worst in the vinegar. The beans really suck it up, so don’t be shy. Pour this dressing over the beans in a bowl. Add the onions and toss with your hands. If you do it with a spoon, you’ll break the beans. Taste. More salt? More vinegar? Yes? Add. Put the salad in the fridge to chill. Sprinkle sumac over the top before eating, if you have it.
Local apricots arrive and depart faster than you can say “schnapps.”
I love fruit in desserts. Calling this a cake is a little optimistic, as it is very rustic—meaning it looks like something went wrong—and more horizontal than vertical. But warm from the oven, the fruit heated to intensity, its flavor is hard to beat.
SERVES SIX
7 tablespoons (100 g) unsalted butter
1/2 cup (100 g) white sugar
2 eggs
6 tablespoons (45 g) flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon apricot brandy or schnapps (see Note)
5 fresh apricots, halved, or sliced thickly
Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Butter a 7 1/2-inch (19-cm) round springform pan.
In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar until pale. Add 1 egg and a dusting of flour and mix again. Add the second egg and more flour, and when that is smooth, add the rest of the flour and the baking powder, stirring very well until the mixture is smooth. Finally, blend in the brandy or schnapps.
Spread the apricots, cut side down, on the bottom of the prepared pan. I like concentric circles, but chaos is fine, too. Pour the cake batter over them and smooth it—it will just cover the apricots. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until lightly browned at the edges and firm to the touch. Remove from the oven, release the ring of the pan, and allow to cool. Transfer the cake to a serving plate. This is best eaten within a few hours. Good for breakfast the next day too, but avoid refrigerating it as it turns rather solid.
Note: To make your own apricot schnapps, cover sliced apricots (and 3 or 4 apricot kernels from inside the pit) with good vodka or eau de vie in a big jar and leave them to become acquainted for a month. Strain through muslin and bottle the alcohol. The alcohol-infused fruit is delicious with whipped cream. What isn’t?
