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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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October 9, 2017 by Terry Teachout

Mrs. T and I ate fresh corn on the cob and tomatoes for dinner for three nights in a row last week. My long-lost childhood self would have boggled at the thought of so unswerving a diet: I was moderately vegetable-aversive and also had a medium-sized tomato problem. It wasn’t until I met Mrs. T and started summering in rural Connecticut that I discovered the joys of dining on fresh vegetables bought at farm stands close to home.

I suspect this state of affairs had not a little to do with the fact that my mother, who grew up during the Great Depression, never quite got over the miracle of canned vegetables. While my family must have eaten fresh corn on the cob at one time or another, I can’t remember our doing so. Most of the corn I ate back then—always with extreme reluctance—was spooned out of a dish. I’d never even heard the phrase “farm-to-table restaurant” until Mrs. T introduced me to it, nor did I have the slightest notion of what a resplendent pleasure it is to eat vegetables that are picked and purchased the same day they end up on your plate.

Mrs. T favors simple food, and there’s nothing she likes better than corn and tomatoes, which we buy at a stand located ten minutes or so from our front door. At first she served them as part of a varied rotation of dishes, but in time she got around to broaching the possibility that we might want to consider eating them more often in season, which led in due course to last week’s farmstand orgy.

As I sat on the front porch husking corn late one afternoon, I remembered a passage from Rex Stout’s Might as Well Be Dead in which Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe’s trusty assistant, complains to Fritz Brenner, Wolfe’s personal chef, about the frequency with which shad roe is served each spring in the old brownstone at 454 West 35th Street:

“Hey,” I protested, “we had shad roe for lunch! Again for dinner?”

“My dear Archie.” He was superior, to me, only about food. “They were merely sauté, with a simple little sauce, only chives and chervil. These will be en casserole, with anchovy butter made by me. The sheets of larding will be rubbed with five herbs. With the cream to cover will be an onion and three other herbs, to be removed before serving. The roe season is short, and Mr. Wolfe could enjoy it three times a day. You can go to Al’s place on Tenth Avenue and enjoy a ham on rye with coleslaw.” He shuddered.

The season for corn and tomatoes is almost as short, and while I’m not absolutely sure I’d care to eat them three times a day, I’d certainly consider it.

Such summer feasts, however, are not without an accompanying touch of autumnal melancholy. For those who, like Mrs. T and I, have crossed the sixtieth meridian, it’s hard not to wonder come October how many more seasons remain for us to feast on the fruits of the field. Indeed, I found myself thinking of these oft-quoted lines by A.H. Housman as Mrs. T set yet another heaping plate in front of me:

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

In other words, memento mori! Yet there are many possible responses to that dark imperative, not all of them drably penitential. We have it on good authority that it is man’s part to rejoice in the fruits of the earth and the fullness thereof, which strikes me as an impeccable reason to eat all the fresh corn and tomatoes that are going for as long as is humanly possible.

I’m no farmer, but I do know from experience that the corn in northeast Connecticut won’t be as good this week, and come next week it might not even be worth husking. Be that as it may, I expect that Mrs. T and I will be heading to the Red Barn Creamery later today to see what’s in the bin. If it looks good, we’ll bring some home, and if not…well, we’ll eat something else tonight. Robert Frost said it: nothing gold can stay.

* * *

Bryn Terfel and Malcolm Martineau perform “Loveliest of trees,” George Butterworth’s setting of A.E. Housman’s poem:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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