gratitude 103Hindu might order up fast- food burgers just because she had a crowd to
feed.
It put us in a bit of a pickle, though, to contemplate feeding a huge
crowd on the products of our county this month. If my mother had borne
me in some harvest- festival month like October, it would have been easy.
But she (like most sensible mammals, come to think of it) had all her chil-
dren in the springtime, a fact I’d never minded until now. Feeding just my
own household on the slim pickings of our local farms had been a chal-
lenge in April. The scene was perking up in May, but only slightly. Our
spring had been unusually wet and cool, so the late- spring crops were
slow coming in. We called a friend who cooks for a living, who came over
to discuss the game plan.
Apparently, the customary starting point for caterers in a place that
lacks its own food culture is for the client to choose a food theme that is
somebody else’s land- based food culture. Then all you have to do is im-
port the ingredients from somebody else’s land. Mediterranean? A ban-
quet of tomato- basil-mozzarella salads, eggplant caponata, and butternut
ravioli—that’s a crowd pleaser. And out of the question. No tomatoes or
eggplants yet existed in our landscape. Our earliest of early tomatoes was
just now at the blossom stage. Mexican? Enchiladas and chipotle rice?
Great, except no peppers or tomatillos were going to shine around here.
Siberian Tundra was maybe the cuisine we were after. We began to grow
glum, thinking of borscht.
Not to worry, said Kay. A good food artist knows her sources. She
would call the farmers she knew and see what they had. Starting with in-
gredients, we’d build our menu from there. As unusual as this might seem,
it is surely the world’s most normal way of organizing parties—the grape
revels of Italy and France in September, the Appalachian ramp hoedowns
in April, harvest festivals wherever and whenever a growing season ends.
That’s why Canadian Thanksgiving comes six weeks before ours: so does
Canadian winter. We were determined to have a feast, but if we meant to
ignore the land’s timetable of generosity and organize it instead around
the likes of birthdays, a good travel weekend, and the schedules of our
musician friends, that was our problem.
Kay called back with a report on our county’s late May pantry. There