End-of-Summer Blues

Among the bounty of summer produce—zucchini, eggplant, tomato, corn, all kinds of berries, peaches, cherries—I’m tempted to say that I love zucchini the most.

There are so many ways to cook it: diced and lightly fried with minced garlic in olive oil; grated and melted into a vegetable stew; cut lengthwise, dipped in egg and flour, pan-fried, and presented grandly as zucchini steaks. They’re all delicious, the zucchini always keeping its hint of sweetness, its texture meltingly soft and tender.

A terrific preparation, but perhaps the most labor-intensive, is zucchini fritters. Zucchini is grated, salted, and the water pressed out. The grated vegetable is then mixed with minced garlic, eggs, and flour. Sometimes I add a Filipino flourish—dried shrimp. Known as hibe in Tagalog, dried shrimp is available in Chinese and Korean markets in New York. I soak half a cup in hot water, chop it roughly, and add the soft pink mass to the batter. It makes a huge difference in taste and texture to the fritter, the dried shrimp adding a rich mouth-filling umami. It also adds a sporadic crunch to the fritter because the shrimp shells and heads, while in tiny fragments because chopped, still have a residual hardness. Sometimes I do the Italian version of the fritter and add grated parmesan.

I drop spoonfuls of the batter to a hot frying pan slicked with oil and fry one side to a golden brown, turn it, and fry the other side. Once they’re cooked, we eat them dipped in vinegar when it’s the Filipino version or with a squeeze of lemon when it’s the Italian version. The first time I prepared and cooked zucchini fritters a few years ago, the taste and texture of the first bite—the crispness of the grated and fried vegetable, the salinity of the hibe, the bracing acidity of the vinegar—evoked in me a cascade of memories.

It’s my grandmother’s ukoy that I remembered. I have a specific memory too: arriving at her house in the barrio, going into the kitchen where she sat on a bench, an enameled tin basin in front of her filled with an orange batter that she mixed by hand. It’s orange because she used grated squash for her ukoy. When I did a quick internet search, most ukoy recipes are made with bean sprouts or just dried shrimp. A trendy Filipino restaurant in the city offers ukoy made with shredded carrots and cabbage as an appetizer—I have to say this doesn’t sound very appetizing at all.

Zucchini is not native in the Philippines, although I heard it’s now widely available there. I first learned about it in high school when I read a book by a man who was bullied by neighborhood boys because his mother gave their mothers zucchini from her garden and they were constantly forced to eat the vegetable. It has a reputation for being easy to grow and is supposedly profligate in blooming in farms and backyard gardens. This has been true every summer. Last summer, produce was breathtakingly plentiful and cheap. All varieties of eggplants, zucchini and yellow summer squash, peaches, and tomatoes were constantly abundant in stores and always discounted. This summer, for one reason or another (climate change? water shortages? backlash from the overproduction last summer? Donald Trump?), seasonal produce is not as abundant and not as cheap.

There’s something melancholic in the site of produce bins with tiny hills of zucchini and squash when last summer there were heaping mountains of them. Even corn is not as abundant this summer.

Or maybe I’m just feeling the melancholy of the end of summer. It’s not really a shortage. They’re always available and I buy them even when they’re not discounted—they’re still better and cheaper in the summer anyway. The season is almost over, but I have many excellent food memories—a luscious fried eggplant in July, a cold peach I ate standing in front of an open refrigerator, a sublime golden tomato in a salad last week, strawberries and cream, sweet corn, and plums that I eat while thinking of William Carlos Williams’s poem “This Is Just to Say”—which makes the plums taste infinitely better.