There is a fortnight in the middle of October when this ridge cannot decide what season it is in. The figs are finished but not gone. The tomatoes are still coming, though each one takes a day longer to ripen than the last. And somewhere in that fortnight the first rain arrives, usually overnight, and everything changes at once.
I write the menu at about eleven each morning, after the market run comes back. In August that is a formality — the same twelve things are on the trestle every week and the only question is how to cook them. In October it is a genuine negotiation with whoever is behind the table.
The last of the summer
We hold the tomatoes as long as we can. Late in the season they lose water and gain sugar, which makes them worse raw and considerably better roasted whole, skin on, until they collapse. That dish goes on the board about the second week of the month and stays until the vines give up.
The figs are the opposite problem. They arrive faster than thirty covers can eat them and they will not wait. Half go into the kitchen; the rest are laid out on the sideboard at breakfast until they run out, which they always do by nine.
The best thing about cooking here is also the hardest: I cannot promise you anything. I can only promise it will be what the ridge had that morning.
After the first rain
The rain does three things. It ends the tomatoes within about a week. It brings the mushrooms up on the north side of the escarpment, which Tomas walks for on his day off and sells to us at a price he refuses to negotiate. And it drops the evening temperature enough that people want the fire lit at supper, which changes what we want to cook entirely.
Broadly, the menu moves like this over those fourteen days:
- Raw and cold dishes come off first — nobody wants them once the terrace gets cool.
- The hearth does more work: whole fish, then whole birds, then, by November, the shoulder cuts that need four hours.
- Anything green gets braised rather than dressed.
- Pudding stops being fruit and starts being flour.
What to order if you come this month
Whatever came off the hearth. If you are here on a Thursday, stay for the cellar tasting at five and eat late — Ingrid pours six things that will make more sense with the food than they do alone, and she will tell you exactly why.
And if you want the figs, come down to breakfast before nine.