What July Tastes Like to Me
If you ask me when to throw the dinner you have been meaning to throw, my answer is always the same. Now. Whatever month it is when you ask. But July, I will admit, makes my case better than most.
Right now the produce coming out of the Midwest is doing the work for me. Sweet corn so fresh it barely needs heat. The first heirloom tomatoes hitting their real stride, the ones that taste like sunlight and not like the cottony things we suffer through in February. Stone fruit at the farm stands, peaches and plums heavy enough to drip down your wrist. Blueberries, basil by the armful, zucchini before it gets tired. This is the month the whole region shows off, and I get to stand in the middle of it with a knife.
This is the part of eating people miss when they order the same dish year-round. A tomato in July and a tomato in January are not the same food. When I build a menu around what is good this exact week, the meal tastes like the moment you are living in.
A kitchen plating the same dish for eight months straight cannot give you that.
I learned to eat this way long before I learned to cook. Where I grew up in the middle of the Mediterranean, on the coast, you ate what was ready and you knew exactly where it came from. I have spent my career chasing that same feeling in other people's homes, standing at a stranger's stove with a basket of something that was in the ground a day ago.
So here is my unsolicited advice. Do not wait for the milestone. The anniversary, the big birthday, the reason. Some of the best dinners I cook are for no occasion at all beyond the fact that the food is perfect right now and someone decided to gather the people they love around a table for it.
If you like these little Chef’s snippets, I write them for our newsletter at . And if a summer night has you wanting a full table and a menu built around the best week of the season, I would love to cook it.
— Chef Francis Pascal