Preserving week: how summer gets onto the winter menu

There is one trick to serving a bright winter menu in the Hudson Valley, and it isn’t a greenhouse. It’s August.

Twice each August we close the dining room — always a Monday and Tuesday — and the whole kitchen does nothing but preserve. Around 800 pounds of tomatoes get passed and jarred. Peaches and sour cherries from Marrow Hill Orchard are split between brandy jars and the dehydrator. Hot peppers are fermented into the house hot sauce that rides alongside the winter fried chicken. Corn is cut, blanched, and frozen the same morning it’s picked.

Where it shows up

Five months later, that work is most of what makes the winter card sing:

• The tomato conserva becomes the base of the braised beans served with the lamb.
• The brandied peaches finish the winter custard.
• The fermented pepper sauce is, frankly, the reason the winter fried chicken has regulars.

Why bother?

Buying February tomatoes from two thousand miles away would be cheaper and far less work. But the entire premise of this restaurant is that the food has an address. Preserving lets us keep that promise in the months when the valley is asleep — winter dishes still credit Foxglove Flats and Marrow Hill, because that’s whose fruit is in the jar.

If you’d like to learn the method, we run a public canning workshop on the second preserving day each August. It’s $45, it includes lunch and six jars to take home, and it sells out by June — call (518) 555-0181 to get on the list.