The mood at the Union Square greenmarket, nearing 5 p.m. on a suddenly cool Friday over which rain clouds hung, might best be described as back-to-school gloom.
Was it the vendors packing up their tables and tents? The beginning raindrops and gray 66 degrees, after a Wednesday that had burned the day long at 90? Or simply the reality of being four short days from September and so glimpsing the official end of summer?
For all the melancholy that the final week of August can drum up, however, there is the offered comfort of the rapturous, glorious glut of summer's final big push: tomatoes, tomatoes, and more tomatoes, plus peaches, plums, peppers, lovely root vegetables with two-foot-long plumes of greenery, the last blueberries and strawberries, okra, basil by the armload, and the beginnings of the apples in earnest.
And of course there is the corn. Its end-of-the-day tables resemble ladies fitting rooms after a Memorial Day sale: immodestly exposed cobs, husks hanging from the tables and trampled and littering the muddied ground, and no end to the shedding glossy top floss, with its mission of attaching to everyone who brushes by.
The other perk — not of the end of the season but the end of the day — is that the baked goods go on sale. "Onedollaronedollaronedollar!" two men yelled over each other at the Muffin Madness tent, where rectangles of sour cream cornbread, blueberry muffins, and peanut butter cookies were being snatched up in type of frenzy particular to suddenly announced sales on limited-supply items.
But come Saturday morning, toasted with over-easy eggs and a dollop of crème fraiche, a brick of sour-cream-coconut cornbread is sure to prove itself worthy of the struggle.
0 comments:
Post a Comment