🍂 Autumn vegetarian recipes

Autumn is a harvest, and that is what separates it from the winter that follows. Squashes arrive whole and heavy, apples drop, mushrooms come up after the rains, and the roots — beetroot, sweet potato, turnip — are lifted before the first frosts. None of it is picked leaf by leaf: it is brought in and stored.

Guadeloupe turns it into red kuri squash colombo, a Caribbean curry in which squash cooked in its skin falls apart into a spiced sauce. The highlands of Guatemala wait for the rainy season to make red beans with chanterelles: those mushrooms are foraged rather than bought. They come up there after the May rains, at a quite different moment of the year from the woods of Europe: the clearest illustration of what a season page can say, and of what it cannot. In Denmark, æblekage settles the question of a glut of apples — a kilo of sharp ones stewed down and layered with buttered rye crumbs.

The squashes turn up again on the winter page. Picked in autumn, they keep right through the winter in a cool room, and they are the link between the two seasons. Several dishes here also appear on the summer page, which is as it should be: beetroot is lifted from late summer onwards, and Polish chłodnik serves it ice-cold with cucumber.

One point a world atlas cannot skip: the seasons named here are those of the northern hemisphere. They are reversed in Australia, Argentina and New Zealand, where this autumn is a spring. These pages therefore name a season and never a month, because the same month is not the same season on the two sides of the equator.