Aesop’s harvest dinner

Ants and grasshoppers alike can share in the season’s bounty

The word harvest brings to mind many images: bounty, a shift in season, canning and pickling the season’s grand finale. The light and leaves change, turning golden, and the air smells sweet and earthy.

As Aesop’s ant taught us, harvest is the culmination of summertime efforts, the reaping of all that has been sowed. Farmers work tirelessly through seasons the proverbial grasshoppers spent singing. As a fine reward, they receive an overwhelming abundance in the fields, and luckily for us, it flows into our markets.

Harvest has haunted my chef friends with olfactory memories of stacking baled hay in old barns and with the spicy smell of onions being pulled from the earth, inspiring hot soups on cold autumn days.

Apple orchards, plump with ancient varietals, beget cider, cloudy and sweet like tangy syrup. Flat fields sprawl with vines dotted with orange pumpkins.

It is near impossible to resist the last fruits of the season when spotting little, reddishpink crab apples or frosted concord grapes. Meaty squashes and herb-roasted meats begin to satisfy our heartier cravings as days grow shorter and thoughts of hibernation begin to stir in anticipation of chillier evenings indoors with good company.

So it is completely appropriate that a friend recalled, perhaps purely from imagination, that the ant shared his bounty with the singing grasshopper at the end of Aesop’s story. And whether sitting on a farm or in an urban home, harvest seems best celebrated, shared abundantly at our dinner tables.