Back in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, at the opposite end of the year, we spend an afternoon among trees and falling leaves and chickadees. I find spicebush berries and collect them for the cookies and the bourbon which they infuse with their lemon zest scent. The woods are thick with leaves and all interest lies upwards, now, and not at our feet, as it does in spring. Sassafras is flat yellow in thickets crowding the woodland path, and every oak is colored to temperatures of blood. The smooth cordgrass feathering the shoreline is pale, frayed straw. Treed islands float, reflected in the water’s mirror surface. A man and a boy drift in a canoe, their life vests bright yellow against the autumn wall of trees on the shore beyond.
In Brooklyn, a long walk rising and falling among the hills and vales of Green-Wood reveals clusters of maitake (or hen of the woods) mushrooms, growing on the woody roots of giant beeches and soaring oaks still covered in rich green leaf. I collect them and fill a paper bag that becomes a significant weight as we walk. Beside a grassy path the unmistakable lavender caps of blewits rise just above the damp surface. I cut their stalks and add the pretty mushrooms to our stash. Large, nervous flocks of migrating northern flickers feed in the grass before rising up into the trees at my approach.
The first furred quinces arrive at the farmers’ market, yellow and slightly bruised. I choose very small ones, which smell, as they ought to, of the sweetest apples. They will be dessert, roasted with juniper. I buy Honeycrisp apples and find elusive muscat grapes on Court Street. Supper shapes up. I carry my shopping home to the dark apartment where the warm lamplight reveals a sleeping cat and a terrace filled with quiet, cold plants above which, much later, several flights of geese pass, flying south.
Shorter days and longer nights signal our transition to daytime picnics, cold and brisk, when sitting in the sun becomes the pleasure we had half forgotten.
Halloween and its sense of otherness creep closer. Chrysanthemums and frilled kale are joined on stoop steps by jack-o’-lanterns and furry spiders. Estorbo sits in the gutter at the edge of the terrace above the annual children’s parade and looks like a staged cat, ready to fly.
I pick an eccentric posy from the terrace to take to friends for dinner. Strawberries on long stems, blue plectranthus, parsley, thyme, a spray of Mexican cherry tomatoes. After a very good meal, filled with roast rack of lamb and good red wine and excellent cheese that really did lie down and cry, we leave the Flatiron District at 11:30 and decide to walk back to Brooklyn.
Down Broadway, past the clubs, the lines, the very short skirts and very high heels, past bags of trash on sidewalks waiting for pickup, past garbage trucks collecting the contents of street trash cans posted at every corner, down past Spring Street, a look left to see the red awning of Balthazar and its own clutch of suited patrons in the yellow lamplight, on past Grand Street, Broadway quiet now, no clubs on the main drag, crossing Canal, all shut up, no Midwestern tourists buying knockoffs from dark West Africans, past Federal Plaza where we had our interview for Vincent’s green card, on to City Hall where the irrigation system in the lawn has sprung two huge leaks that pour straight up and over the sidewalk, past the sign in the grass saying Passive Recreation Only No Team Sports, across the park and onto Brooklyn Bridge, empty now, past midnight, just a few walkers and cyclists heaving up the incline, the Frank Gehry building on the right, the Woolworth behind us in uplit ornate stone and green copper, a cool breeze but not cold with the walking. The cables of the bridge an orderly and exact beauty, the flag on the far side flapping, Manhattan’s lying limp. Walking above the traffic where three cars are snarled in a rear-ender with police lights flashing and buckled bonnet and broken glass, a girl leaning over the balustrade from the boardwalk to see what is happening in this exciting New York. A seagull flying by, down toward the harbor, wings in spotlit white, the yellow lights of Staten Island making it seem a familiar town, just across the water. The temperature shows 63°F/17°C on the Watchtower building, and we walk down into Brooklyn past Cadman Plaza under the plane trees and into Brooklyn Heights, following Vince’s running route, turning to his rhythm, on dark streets not of my habit, and walking down Henry, the last few blocks on tiptoe as my shoes unused to walking so far bite into my heels, stopping at the corner deli to buy cat food for the cat’s emergency breakfast, seeing the Arabic owner giving the local addict his free sandwich for the night, the old man bent double and permanently plugged into headphones. We cross Atlantic, past the bar on Henry where lights and voices spill onto the sidewalk while apartments sleep above guarded by fire escapes, turning up to the townhouse steps, climbing the stairs, smelling the skunk of pot on the first floor, hearing the cat start to yell as we hit the second, key in lock, open door, home at 1:00 A.M.
The best boeuf bourguignon I’ve ever eaten was at Les Halles on Park Avenue for Anthony Bourdain’s fiftieth birthday bash and book launch.
Bourdain’s use of the weirdly named “chicken steak,” a cut of chuck with a seam of fatty gristle running down the center, revolutionized my own recipe. Chicken steak is also called flatiron steak, paleron, and plain old chuck. But that seam in the middle defines it.
Earthy with freshly gathered hen-of-the-woods (maitake) mushrooms, fragrant with terrace-grown herbs, and sweet with carrots and onions, this is sloppy, happy fall food and is even better the next day, after chilling overnight.
SERVES SIX 
3 1/2 pounds (1.6 kg) chicken steak, cubed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 strips fatty bacon or pancetta
2 tablespoons butter
3 onions, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons flour
1 bottle of red wine
3 large carrots, peeled and cut into 1 1/2-inch (4-cm) sections (halve any thick pieces)
6 cloves garlic, slightly squashed
8 parsley stalks with leaves
10 sprigs thyme
3 bay leaves
3 cups (290 g) hen of the wood, in bite-size pieces
Baguette, for serving
Season the cubed beef with salt and pepper. In a heavy pot, cook the bacon over medium heat until the fat renders. Remove the bacon and set it aside. Increase the heat to high. In small batches, brown the seasoned beef in the rendered bacon fat. Remove the browned meat and set it aside in a bowl.
Reduce the heat and add the butter. When it foams, add the onions. Stir, then cover and sweat the onions for 5 minutes. Remove the lid and sauté for 10 minutes more, or until the onions are pale golden. Sprinkle the flour over the onions, stir again, and cook for a couple of minutes. Pour the wine over the onions and stir like mad to scrape up the fond (the delicious brown stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan). Return the meat to the pot and add the carrots, garlic, parsley, thyme, and bay leaves. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to keep the mixture at a gentle simmer. Cook for 1 hour, covered, stirring every now and then. Add the mushrooms. Cook for another 1 1/4 hours, uncovered, then taste and add salt and pepper as necessary. Test the meat with a fork; it should be fall-apart tender.
To serve, ladle the stew into bowls and set a hot-from-the-oven baguette (or two) in the middle of the table, ready to be torn apart by hungry hands.
Spotless days turn inside out so that September roars away like a fiend, sweeping October in on wings of water.
Heeding wind gust warnings ahead of the outer bands of an approaching hurricane, I heave the fig down onto the stone table to prevent toppling. The wind throws the Iceberg rose onto the terrace, breaking its supports.
The gale pulls and tears and subsides and then rises to a shuddering pitch again, whistling, heaving, threatening. We are a creaking ship in a storm at sea. It begins to hail. Soon it rains, really, really hard, water sluicing through the gutters and down to the street.
The rain ends the next afternoon and the clouds open to admit the western sun. The silver roofs across the road turn gold and within seconds a rainbow materializes in the east, spanning Brooklyn from north to south, filling our horizon. The leaves of the fig and the strawberries are shredded.
And then the seamless blue days arrive. The air is electric. Every day the Vs of geese pass, southerning. Every evening the old brick hospital building that dwarfs our block lights up as though fired from within.
On the roof the dwarf kale and tender pea shoots and mesclun and mustard sown in the low troughs and pots empty of eggplant and pole tomatoes give us daily bowls of salad. Perhaps, in a former life, I was a rabbit: these pools of green leaves make me very happy. I collect the last branches of indefatigable cherry tomatoes.
Summer savory is drying in the low oven, the leaves and seeds remaining powerfully fragrant for months. I add them to goulashes and sprinkle them over wild mushroom pizzas, but never manage to use them all before the new season starts. The kitchen smells deliciously of sweet fern syrup on the stove. The apartment is warm, and for the first time in as long as I can remember that is a good thing.
I hear geese calling again in the night sky. It is a high, heartsore sound. The sound of seasons turning, countries calling, homes remembered, life passing. The sound of being left behind, and the desire to follow.
I was born at the end of October in the southern hemisphere. It is late springtime in South Africa, a month of wildflowers in ditches and fields and mountains. I miss that spring, but up here, eight thousand miles away in the north, I am happy to be breathing the fresh, dry air of a leaf-turning fall whose beauty I knew only from books. There is something about the quality of the light in both places, in this month, which is similar. A transparency, a sense of yearning that belongs to the months that touch each side of winter.
Smoked Trout Sambal with Watercress Salad
Sweet fern is Comptonia peregrina. It has fragrant, hay-scented leaves that smell like summer. A nip of bourbon infused with the sweet fern and topped with sparkling wine, preferably sipped on a cold roof, after a long walk, with a good sunset, is my idea of October perfection.
MAKES ONE COCKTAIL
1 ounces (1 tablespoon) sweet fern bourbon (see Note)
Chilled cava
Pour 1 ounce of sweet fern bourbon into a flute and top with chilled cava.
Note: To make your own sweet fern bourbon, cover sweet fern leaves with 17 ounces (500 ml) bourbon in a big jar, and add 1/2 cup (100 g) sugar. Seal and allow to infuse for two months before straining and decanting.
Some of the best influences on South African cooking came from the Indian Ocean rim, brought to the country with Southeast Asian slaves when the Dutch and then British exerted colonial control over seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century South Africa.
In Cape Town this smoked fish sambal would be made with snoek (Thyrsites atun), a fish local to southern Atlantic waters and resembling a barracuda—long, silver, and pointy. Its oily flesh is perfect for smoking and flakes easily from the big bones. In New York, I use smoked trout, or mackerel. The sambal is best eaten within a couple of hours of preparation, while the raw onion is still fresh. If I were being true to tradition, the fish and onion would be pounded in a mortar until fine and resembling more of a paste. I prefer flakes.
Leftover sambal makes excellent potted fish for a picnic. Simply pack it quite tightly into a ramekin and pour melted butter over it. Chill, and it’s ready to go.
SERVES SIX
4 smoked trout fillets (about 1 pound / 455 g)
1 medium onion (about 2/3 cup / 110 g), chopped very finely
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
Juice of 2 lemons
1/2 hot chile, sliced very thinly in rounds
Freshly ground black pepper
1 farmers’ market fresh apple, cored
Fresh lemon juice
2 bunches watercress, (5 loose cups / 170 g)
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Butter, for serving
Brown Bread, for serving
Make the sambal: Pull the skin from the fish fillets and discard. Using two forks, flake the flesh, carefully removing every bone you see. Now shred the trout more finely. Check for bones again.
In a bowl, mix the onion and ginger with the fish. Add enough lemon juice to moisten. Mix in the chile, and taste for spice levels and a good sour-salty balance. Add more lemon juice if you like. Finish with plenty of pepper.
Make the watercress salad: Cut the apple into very thin slices. Sprinkle some lemon juice over them. Heap the watercress in a salad bowl or on a flat plate and shake some olive oil over it. Sprinkle some lemon juice over that, and finish with a light dusting of salt. Top or surround with the apple.
To serve, transfer the fish to a pretty bowl and allow everyone to help themselves with a spoon. Butter slices of brown bread, press the fish onto it, and take a bite. Follow with a sprig of watercress and a crunchy apple slice.
Walk into any supermarket or bakery, any food shop, any corner café (the South African equivalent of a deli or bodega), and you will find variations of this moist brown bread. These dense—but not heavy—nutty-tasting loaves are impossible to find beyond South Africa, and must be made at home.
A slice of this bread is the perfect vehicle for some grated cheddar with a dollop of chutney, or butter and jam at breakfast, or for piles of the smoky, salty sambal, pressed into its buttered surface.
MAKES 1 LOAF
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons yeast
3/4 pound (340 g) whole-wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons currants, raisins, or sunflower seeds
Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Grease a loaf pan well.
Stir the sugar and yeast into 1 cup (240 ml) of water and leave to bubble. Mix the flour and salt together in a large bowl. When the yeast mixture is bubbly, pour it into the flour mixture and stir well with a wooden spoon. Add another 3/4 cup (180 ml) of water and the currants, stirring to combine. Pour this loose, sticky dough into the prepared pan and bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the bread comes out clean. Turn the bread out of the pan—the loaf should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom—and allow to cool, wrapped loosely in a clean dishcloth.
When you stand with each of your feet on a different continent, you learn to live with a constant sense of longing for the other place. I lull the longing with food.
When I left South Africa for what was intended to be a six-month stay in the States my mother gave me a recipe book that she had written by hand, just for me, with all my favorite food in it, including Ouma’s Spicy Lamb Shanks. My mother knew what I did not: that I wasn’t coming back. I left her at the airport with tears streaming down her face. That is my great regret.
These lamb shanks are my grandmother Quez’s recipe. Her name comes from the Xhosa word khwezi, meaning “star”—an unusual choice for a white child born in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. Her father was a transport rider, driving wagons between towns during the Anglo-Boer War, and he must have seen many stars every dark night.
I like to serve this stew—or tagine—with nothing more than a heaping bowl of steaming farro, cooked until tender, and into which I have stirred a tablespoon of butter. Incidentally, this is one dish not to prepare a day ahead, as so many stews are. The lamb shanks remain resolutely tough when reheated.
SERVES SIX
6 lamb shanks, each cut into 3 or 4 pieces
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup (30 g) flour
1 cup (175 g) prunes, soaked in hot water
1 cup (150 g) raisins, soaked in hot water
1/2 cup (100 g) sugar
1 1/4 teaspoons black pepper
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon allspice
3/4 teaspoon cloves
3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
1/4 teaspoon salt
Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Grease a casserole dish with a lid.
Season the lamb shanks with salt and pepper. Dust them with the flour, shaking off any excess. Place the shanks in the prepared casserole and cook, covered, until tender, about 2 hours.
In a saucepan over medium heat, combine the remaining ingredients with 1 1/2 cups (360 ml) of water. Bring to a boil and then simmer for 5 minutes.
Remove the casserole from the oven and drain the fat that has accumulated (but save any brown juices). Add the fruit mixture, return to the oven, and cook another 30 minutes. Serve from the dish at table.
In the Karoo at the end of summer in South Africa quinces line dusty farm roads. In the Cape they are planted as espaliered hedges on grand farms within low whitewashed walls. Their perfume is intense. It is like the sum of all the best apples you have ever tasted and some about which you may only have dreamed. A bowl of ripe quinces is one of the happiest things imaginable.
Cooked, they are acquiescent and surprising, turning garnet and firm in a slow syrup, or pale and soft when baked in a low oven. Roasted, they are chewy on the outside, creamy in the middle. They partner well with pork, lamb, and game and are wonderful as dessert. Chewed while still fleshy, the juniper berries are a sweet, seedy snack, with a pungency that suggests good gin.
SERVES SIX
6 small quinces, skins brushed to remove fuzz, cored, and halved
1/3 cup (65 g) sugar
8 juniper berries
Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C).
Put the halved quinces in a flat baking dish with 1 cup (240 ml) water, the sugar, and the juniper berries. Roast them for 90 minutes. Baste occasionally and check on the pan syrup, adding water if it threatens to dry up.
It sounds suspiciously simple, but that’s all they need. The fruit is a little tart but very soft, and the skins are pleasurably chewy with caramelized edges.
