The Chile Harvest

New Mexico's year turns in September, when the chile harvest comes up from the river valleys and the roasters, steel drums turning over propane flame, spin at the farmers markets and grocery lots of Santa Fe, blistering green chile by the bushel while the smell, smoky, vegetal, and completely unduplicated, drifts across the city as the state's true new year. The harvest towns of these pages celebrate apples and grapes elsewhere. Here the crop is capsicum, and the season is a civic holiday measured in bushels.

The ritual has its liturgy, the farmers market on the rail yard filling Saturday mornings with the valley's growers, the chile stacked in burlap by variety and heat, the roaster operators turning the drums while customers watch their own bushel blister, and the transaction completing at home, the roasted pods peeled, bagged, and frozen in a household ceremony that provisions the state's kitchens for the year. The visitor participates at any scale, a quart peeled and eaten within days, or the full bushel shipped, which the vendors arrange with the ease of long practice.

The harvest weeks flavor the whole city per its eating pieces in these pages, the restaurants running green-chile specials at their September freshest, the red strings, the ristras, appearing on portals and market stalls as the season's decor and next year's pantry, and the aspen gold arriving in the mountains above town on the same calendar, per the leaf doctrine, so that the classic day pairs the market morning with the high-country afternoon. The fiesta season's burnings and processions share the same weeks, the city's calendar at its fullest.

Come the first three weeks of September, buy at the rail-yard market on Saturday with breakfast from the stalls, and watch your own half bushel roast, which is the ceremony's essential minute. Carry home more than seems sensible, frozen flat per the vendors' counsel. The state argues red versus green all year, per its standing joke, and every September it agrees completely on one thing, the smell of the season starting, in a spinning drum, at the market.