The autumn menu

Originally published in The Laconia Daily Sun ›

In 1940 Bette Davis, the Hollywood legend and Academy Award winning actress, restored a farmhouse on Sugar Hill. While staying in Franconia she met and married the assistant manager of a local inn and they enjoyed New Hampshire for three years before he died in a fall. Ms. Davis’ home, Butternut Cottage, is three miles from Franconia and located on twenty-two wooded acres that overlook the White Mountains.

Butternut Cottage has been restored and a few years ago I rented the house during August. It was magical. Fireplaces throughout the cottage, glass doors opening onto a garden from the living room and lots of bookcases and nooks for curling up with a book. In the evening one could watch a film starring Ms. Davis and imagine her sweeping through the house in a long satin dressing gown.

When I returned to New York I received daily real estate listings for abandoned farmhouses in Northern New Hampshire. Wouldn’t it be lovely sitting by a fire reading, spending the summer gardening, canning and putting up food, gathering fresh eggs, setting up a hive to produce honey, apple trees, knitting woolen socks and even learning how to weave. A fantasy that combined the lives of Thoreau, Tasha Tudor, Donald Hall and others who have written and lived this life. In farmhouses.

Of course, the reality is much different. My gardening, cooking and general housekeeping skills are limited. Further, having spent so much time managing an urban life, I can’t imagine driving up and down dirt roads in a blizzard, thinking of the solitude during the shortest days of the winter and figuring out how to fix anything. In fact, changing a light bulb pushes my limit of do it yourself domestic projects.

I salute those people who live out their dreams of managing a farm. Earlier this year Nate Everts and Regina Rinaldo purchased Longview Farm in Plymouth from John and Carol Perkins who had operated a diary vegetable stand there for forty years and were stewards of this beautiful parcel of land in the the Baker River Valley.

While I enjoy the light, green vegetables that are found in the summer garden I think it is the autumn menus I most enjoy. Butternut squash soup, pumpkin pie, hot pepper biscuits served with pork loin, yams with pecans, white pepper and butter and tarte tatin made with apples just picked from an orchard.

If you share my love of these autumn dishes you might want to visit Longview Farm and meet Regina and Nate. You will find pumpkins of all shapes and sizes and a variety of autumn vegetables. Fill your home with bouquets of autumn leaves and when the weather dips serve butternut squash soup with hot biscuits. You might even pull-down a book of stories by Edgar Allan Poe and begin thinking about a Halloween reading of “The Telltale Heart.”