The Harvest Table: Eating with the Seasons

The single most common question we get before a stay is what breakfast looks like. The honest answer is that it depends entirely on the month, because almost everything on the table comes from within about fifteen kilometres of the house and some of it from the garden outside the kitchen door.

In April the garden is mostly herbs and the first broad beans, so breakfast leans on the dairy: fresh ricotta from the farm at the bottom of the hill, still warm if Marco gets there early enough, with honey from the hives on the far terrace. The bread is the same all year, from a bakery in San Quirico that has used the same starter since the nineteen fifties and closes on Wednesdays without explanation.

The oil on your bread in November was on a tree three days earlier.

July is tomatoes and figs, and it is the month guests most often abandon the sweet side of the table entirely. The figs come off the courtyard tree in two waves, a small one in June and a heavy one in late August, and they are best with the aged pecorino and a little of last year's oil. This is also when we move breakfast half an hour earlier without telling anybody, because by ten the pergola has stopped being comfortable.

Then there is the harvest. From the last week of October into the middle of November the olives come in, and the whole house reorganises itself around the press. Nets go down under the trees, everybody who is staying gets offered a rake and most people take one, and the fruit goes to the frantoio in the village the same day it is picked. What comes back is a green, peppery, faintly bitter oil that catches at the back of your throat, and for about two weeks it is the only thing anyone at breakfast wants to talk about.

If you are choosing dates around food rather than weather, that fortnight is the one. The pool is cold, the evenings need a jumper, and the table is better than at any other point in the year.