Fall 2019 Issue

HARVEST & MEMORIES

Fall, to me, is a fresh-from-the-oven apple dumpling spooned into a bowl with bracingly cold unpasteurized milk. Fall is homemade applesauce, honey-colored and tart and full of apple chunks.

I couldn’t tell you the last time I consumed either, surely it’s been decades, yet each September I think of my grandmother in her kitchen rolling dough against the Formica of her kitchen table and I think of my great-grandmother in her kitchen with her Mason jars and her tongs. September is a wistful time.

Maggie Stahl, my great-grandmother, was born in 1894; her daughter Emma was born in 1917. For those women, August was a brutal month, full of harvest and humidity and pressure cookers. They preserved beans, tomatoes, corn. They canned peaches, cherries, pears. They baked bread, pies, cookies. They made jams, jellies, homemade ice cream. For many years, I was lucky enough to be underfoot. Yet as a teenager I also knew that Maggie Stahl well deserved her late-in-life devotion to pantsuits, TV dinners and All in the Family.

Today, I well know that a proper homemade apple dumpling could bring me to tears. A proper jar of homemade applesauce would do the same. Even so a bread-and- butter pickle. Such is the power of a childhood memory.

In this issue, we celebrate the power of harvest and childhood memories with a unique story by Ambreen Ali, who writes about the farmers who are growing, in Jersey soil, the produce of their faraway childhoods. These farmers are specializing in fruits and vegetables not readily found in the local supermarket, including gongura and kittley, and are reaching a customer base that is grateful for a taste of home. Ali’s Global Farms story on page 38 is another reminder of the energy of multiculturalism and Jersey ingenuity.

Nostalgia also is a central theme of our Road Trip feature, page 74, written by the state’s premier wine and spirits writer, T.J. Foderaro, who reminds us—with his engaging (and name-dropping) personal anecdotes—just how long New Brunswick has been on the cutting edge of the NJ bar scene. Also featured in our Drinks issue is our annual Drinks Guide on page 55 and a primer on beer by expert John Holl on page 50 for those who might be intimidated by what seems to be an entirely new vocabulary that has sprung from the craft beer industry.

In more beverage news, author Andrew Cotto writes about a different kind of coffee shop in Atlantic Highlands, see page 34. And, in an exclusive interview featured on page 47, First Lady Tammy Murphy shares her admiration for both Jersey ingenuity and Jersey wines.

In this issue, we also share, as part of our In Season feature on page 16, a recipe for apple dumplings. In fair warning, it’s not a recipe that’s been personally tested. I’ve never had the emotional fortitude to make apple dumplings myself.