High Summer Issue is on the streets.
Look for the High Summer issue at your favorite winery, farmstand or restaurant. Here's Grist for the Mill to give you a little preview.
Our otherworldly cover photograph by Chuck Close provides a nice metaphor for high summer.
“It’s an amazing process,” said Close, the artist who splits his time between SoHo and a homestead near Mecox Bay, where his wife plants an impressive vegetable garden. Close was referring to daguerreotype, the detailed and expressive photographic process.
“It has an astounding range of grays,” Close continued. “From the brightened whites reflecting
off the polished silver surface to deep dark velvety blacks and everything in between. And it’s not
panchromatic, so it doesn’t read color in a normal way.” In the case of this sunflower, the petals
which we normally see as yellow turn out darker than the flower head which we normally see as
gray. The dark green stem disappears almost entirely. And sort of like an ephemeral sunflower
itself, daguerreotype yields no negative, so it cannot be reproduced, making it all the more precious.
Surreal and precious—not too different from the rushing abundance of August. Anything goes.
The heat dulls our senses and inhibitions and energies enough that we dress down, let our hair
frazzle, and diverge from standard mores.
A friend recently declared that we had officially entered “tomato and cheese sandwich season.”
The following week, she said it was now “cucumber and cheese sandwich season.” We heard
about another person who had apparently eaten melon three times a day for several days. Our
photo essay of netting and then frying whitebait testifies to the completeness of even single-ingredient meals (p. 22). In our Supply and Demand department, Natalie Byrne of Robert’s in Water Mill cruises down the road to the Green Thumb and embraces what she finds, building her menu as she shops (p. 66).
Tomato-related afflictions seem to be common—and not just the sore tongue and inner cheek
kind. When the tomato crop arrives at Sang Lee Farms in Peconic, Karen Lee makes an array of salsas, roasted tomatoes, soups, and even color-specific sauces from the 40 or so heirloom varieties grown by her husband, Fred (p. 10). Sag Harbor’s Tomato Lady quizzes customers on when they will be consuming their purchase—and whether it will have to endure L.I.E. traffic—so that she can fine-tune the ripeness of their fruit (p. 52). The appeal of fresh tomatoes inspires Pietro Bottero of Annona in Westhampton to climb a ladder and harvest his own rooftop crop for cherry-tomato pasta sauces (p. 11).
Cooking in summer does tend to become more plastic as recipes make way for large amounts
of certain ingredients. For Cooking Fresh, we gathered a handful of recipes for succotash, a traditional corn and beans stew; some include such exotica as Long Island lobster, fava beans, and whatever looks good at the farm stand (p. 36).
As the fall harvest approaches, the landscape offers its own surreal pleasures with beige-toned
parched fields, legions of bowing sunflowers, or tasseling sweet corn (p. 14). Part of the appeal of visiting Long Island wine country is the chance to stroll in paradisical settings, whether Peconic Bay Winery in Cutchogue, whose vineyards reminded our writer of the North Fork in the 1950s (p. 40), or the small, family-run Waters Crest tasting which, amidst the bustle of a Route 48 shopping center, can focuses even the most harried summer afternoon on what is truly surreal and precious (p. 18).
