To Autumn
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourne;
Hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
From “To Autumn,” John Keats
The marginal notes for this poem in my high school copy of Major British Writers are all about the pressing weight of time and the sense of melancholy that pervade the poem, and the season: mel., mel, mel., time, mel., time, I dutifully jotted. You can’t deny the sweetly mournful aspects of the season, but of course autumn brings sensual delights as well. It is the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” as Keats writes in the opening line. There are apple trees and grape vines heavy with the harvest’s fragrant weight, plump gourds and hazelnuts, cider oozing from the press. The beehives drip with honey, for benevolent Autumn, a soft-haired beauty, has
…set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer hath o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.
We’d be fools to believe that warm days will never cease, but if there’s a chill in the air, well that just helps to pique the appetite. The pickings at the market may seem a little slim compared to the vegetal glut of midsummer, but what the autumn crops lack in variety they make up for in color: ripe peppers in every fall-ish hue, piles of knobby squash and pumpkins, green trees of brussel sprouts. The carrots and beets are sweeter now, and the weather is perfect for simmering a pot of greens. Apples perfume the market air (if you’re upwind of the Kettle Korn)—how can you not think of pie?
At our house autumn means gratins of squash, leeks in vinaigrette or simmered with cream and wrapped in buckwheat crepes, earthy beet salads, kale cooked down with fresh garlic or roasted in the oven till the leaves are almost crisp. Grated carrot salad—the French favorite carrotes rapées— makes an excellent, simple salad or first course. If those last tomatoes don’t quite have the zip of the summer crop, you can intensify the flavor by slicing them quite thick and spreading them out in a quiche pan or other shallow baking dish. Add some thinly slivered garlic, a few torn leaves of basil if you have some, salt and pepper and a good drizzling of good olive oil. Bake it uncovered in a 275-degree oven for at least two hours and up to four—you’ll have an intensely tomato-y gratin to serve as a side dish with roast pork or lamb, or mixed into pasta, or just piled on some good bread.
Now where, I wonder, will you find some good bread?
Autumn also means the end of the St. Luke’s market, and Real Bread’s first season at the market. On the first Friday of May we rose well before dawn and descended to a kitchen where awaited ten slowly rising batches of bread and a life turned pretty much upside-down. Despite frantic disorganization we got the bread all baked, loaded in the blue bus, and off we tootled to the market, where awaited a thriving little village of four other vendors and about as many shoppers. At the end of an exhilarating afternoon we took home eight-and-a-half batches of bread and pondered whether we’d be better off going into the crouton and breadcrumb business.
Things picked up from there. As the weather warmed the vegetables poured into the market, the sourdough starter became lively, and things got really fun. We’ve made a lot of different breads this year, around thirty varieties at last inexact count. There have been some mishaps, aside from the first week’s horrendous over-production: there was the time I put twice as much salt as required in the sourdoughs; the night when a bottle of orange flower water fell from the cupboard, struck the rim of the glass mixing bowl filled with rye sponge, the bowl disintegrated, glass everywhere, and once the mess was cleaned up five bowls of sourdough sponge went into the trash (we use stainless steel bowls now); there was the time I put more than twice as much salt as required in the brioche.
We’ve gone through sweltering August nights spent covered in flour and leaning into blazing ovens (we considered calling up the Food Network: Any interest in a Naked Bakers series?), and the uncertainty of showing up at the market not knowing if we’d have a place to sell. We always did get a place, though a couple of times we had to share a slot, but, you know, sharing is good, sharing is nice. Now the market is dwindling down, and we’re back to nurturing the dough along, filling every warm space in the house, instead of watching it overflow the bowl like The Blob That Ate Mac-Groveland. Now it’s pleasant to stand by the hot oven, and to get a face full of steam when we open it to check on the bread.
It’s been a swell market season, and we’re grateful to everyone who has shared our bread this year. Sometimes we sit on our deck on Friday evenings and we say, “Think of all those people enjoying our bread tonight. That’s really cool.” Other times we sit on our deck on Friday evening and stare blankly into space, unable to form words or even coherent thoughts, because making bread the way we do it is exhausting work. It’s worth it, though, to be part of this community, this little village that exists for just a few hours a week but brings so much to the neighborhood, has brought so much to us. The season is fleeting, the market will be gone soon, but the community will still be there.
Lots of you have come back week after week, and tried different breads and given us your reactions, and in general encouraged us tremendously. That has been the best part of the market, because although we of course want to sell bread, we’re equally interested in knowing who’s buying it, and what you think about it. We wondered at the start, and occasionally throughout the summer, if there would be any interest in hand-made traditional breads like ours. Now I think we can lay our doubts to rest. You’ve shown us that real bread has a place in a world of fast food and Wonder bread, and for this, and so much else, we say:
Thank you.
Brett & Mary
So while we’re on the topic, let me reiterate and elucidate details for the market to be held the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (note the smooth segue from fawning sentimentality to shameless commerce).
There will be a market the Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving. It will be held at the regular downtown market site from 2:00 to 6:00 p.m.. You’ll be able to pick up your turkey if you’ve ordered one, and there will be other vendors there as well. We don’t know how many, but we hope to be among them.
Whether or not we are among them depends on whether we receive enough advance orders to make it worthwhile. So far we have received exactly zero advance orders. I know it’s still a little early, but there’s only one more St. Luke’s market after this week, and it would be nice to know if there’s any interest among you folks who have bought our bread all summer long.
So it would be helpful if, as soon as possible, you all let us know whether you’re planning to order bread for Thanksgiving. Even if you don’t know what you want, if you could let us know that you want bread and generally how much, it would be a help. If we have your name and phone number or e-mail address, we can get in touch to remind you as the holiday draws near.
Here are the breads we’re tentatively planning to offer:
French rounds and baguettes Vienna bread Potato bread
Brioche Swedish rye
We can make these bread pretty much any shape you want: for example, we can
make a loaf of any of these breads into six or eight rolls, for the same price
as the loaf. We can make a great big loaf, or a couple of smaller ones. If
you want something not listed above and you’re willing to buy a bunch, say, a
half dozen olive breads or fougasse, we can probably manage that.
For now let’s say that the minimum order is one full-size loaf or two little brioche or two baguettes or epis. That’s not so much to ask, is it? Don’t forget about all those turkey sandwiches you’ll be choking down in the days following the holiday. They’ll go down much better on REAL BREAD.
Consider also what a pretty centerpiece a pile of crusty loaves would make! Take a wreath of grape vines or bittersweet and arrange the bread in the center, maybe add a nice gourd or two, or a little pumpkin. Your guests will be so impressed! They’ll think you spent all week poring over back issues of Martha Stewart Living, but you’ll say, “Oh, no, we’re having a REAL BREAD THANKSGIVING!”
Have I mentioned that a Real Bread gift certificate would be the perfect Christmas gift idea for the epicure on your shopping list?
And just another reminder: After the St. Luke’s market ends, we’ll be selling downtown on Saturday mornings from 9:00 to noon. We’ll take the Halloween weekend off, then begin downtown on November 8. In November the market will be in a parking lot near the river. Take Kellogg past the Xcel center in the direction of the regular market place. You’ll see signs dire cting you to the temporary site. It was a lively market when we were there visiting last weekend, and it should be busy for the next few weeks.
Stay tuned for updates.
Again, thanks to you all for a great season. Hope to see you downtown, and next May back at St. Luke’s. We won’t have to wonder where are the songs of Spring, ay where are they….