Summer of My Discontent

SUJATA MASSEY

I have a sentimental relationship with summer. To me it’s a season where certain traditions find their way into three months. I have grand expectations for June to August. I'll know that I'll eat a few dozen ears of corn on the cob. I anticipate getting at least my toes into the ocean or bay or a lake, with good company beside me. I look forward to a few roadtrips with a packed cooler of good food. Riding in my car, I expect to keep hearing a pop song that’s mysteriously caught on with so many deejays that it’s become the de facto summer anthem. During my singleton days, there would also often be a summer romance that would begin in May or June and end before Halloween. Summer always brought tastes of peach cake, berry pies, and homemade ice cream.

I’m older now, and if you asked me two days ago about how things are lining up with expectation, I'd say the only consistency is that the corn has been good. In the midst of a heatwave, my husband and I left 90-plus Baltimore on a strenuous drive to move our son to Nashville, where the weather was even worse. This summer, we got no closer to a body of water than driving by the Baltimore Inner Harbor.  

Oh, this summer does seem to be the one which rebels against pattern. Covid walloped me coming home from a late spring trip to Greece. The good news was I only felt ill for one day—and as far as I know, none of my contacts caught it. But a month after Covid, two insect bites appeared on one arm, both ringed with round scarlet rashes. I didn't think tick bites ever came in twos and was ready to believe it was spider bites, but muscle and joint aches and brain fog followed. I went on Doxycline for two weeks. Yesteryear's summer romance had morphed into a dangerous one-night stand with someone who wanted to leave me with Lyme Disease, Ehrlichiosis, Babesiosis or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. All over the US in 2025, tick-borne illness is exploding, and I remain very grateful to have been prescribed medicine which actually fought the infection.  I recovered, re-emerging from health anxiety into a city where the heat had stayed brutal from its late June on set into early August. 

When I read a weather forecast and know the day will be miserable, I rise at 5 a.m. to experience a few pleasant hours.One of my great pleasures during these times is reading the Sunday New York Times with morning coffee on my front porch, which has a gently whirring ceiling fan. I tried to keep the tradition going, but reading the papers these days makes me anxious. Famine and death and invasion of Gaza, and more than 60,000 people in America dragged off to detention, mostly without due process. And then I see articles about  discontinuing vaccines, shutting down science research, firing government service workers, and shackling universities to censorious oversight. The Voting Rights Act is at risk, and the National Guard have already been sent by the president to break up protests in Los Angeles and remove the homeless from Washington DC. 

I don't know if there is a pop song that’s evocative of this summer; it would probably be too profane for me. I’ve been busy listening to podcasts, though. Favorite are The Ezra Klein Show, We Can Do Hard Things, Rick Steves Travel, and, to fall asleep, Nothing Much Happens. One day, I heard a cookbook author being interviewed on the PBS radio cooking show, Splendid Table. The author, Nicole Rucker, was describing elements of her unorthodox pastry and cake recipes to show host Francis Lam, and I started to salivate. I realized that I hadn’t had a single piece of pie yet. Poor me!

A few days later, I got blueberries and blackberries at the Saturday farmers' market, and I also bought the cookbook. Fat+Flour. I got going on a Monday, right around the time I should have been making a sensible, sugar-free dinner. But I had a couple of sticks of Kerry Gold butter and was going for broke. 

Straight off, I’ll say that the book's subhead promises "a simple bake," and the recipe I followed for Blueberry-Lavender Pie involved many hours of work—starting with making a crust dough that needs chilling to set up before it’s rolled. My freezer was opened and shut for various processes, including freezing half the fruit for the pie, chilling the liquid that goes into the crust, which and then chilling the pie pan with a crimped crust, and later the fully assembled pie with its tasty cream-cheese-butter-flour crumb topping. With oven time of one-hour, the entire process took me almost 5 hours. I found that I really didn’t mind cooking for so long, just for myself, in a quiet, air-conditioned kitchen. The process of following steps was so complicated that allowed me to focus. I've heard of moving meditation. Is there such a thing as a cooking meditation? 

I waited almost the recommended hour to cut into the warm pie. The butter-flour-sugar-salt-cider vinegar crust had strength and tenderness and a great flavor. The berry filling—different from the recipe because I added blackberries, and a lavender-lemon syrup instead of culinary lavender—was tartly glorious. This pie reminded me of the mythical marvels I’ve tasted at roadside diners and pie shops in small-town Wisconsin and Northern Minnesota. But no Crisco in this pie--just Irish butter, three different kinds of sugar and berries from Black Rock Orchard, a steadfast fruit farm I've known for decades.

I wasn't planning on blogging when I was baking and eating last night. I wish I had a picture to show you of the whole pie . . but this is what I’ve got left. I’ll eat a bit more every day. And I will bake another pie, using this book, no matter how complicated it might be. Pie-making brought summer back to me, it's just that simple.