One of the greatest legacies left by my maternal grandmother is a collection of old wooden recipe boxes. The fragile boxes—made by my great grandfather (a furniture maker) and barely held together with rubber bands—were handed down from my great grandmother and are brimming with hundreds of recipes that both women clipped from newspapers throughout the years. Every so often, I’ll visit with my cousin Audrey (the keeper of the boxes), and we’ll go through the clippings, some of which date back to the 1920s and are starting to disintegrate. A recent perusal yielded one such clipping for the following recipe:

Dice 1/2 cup each of carrot, turnip, celery, 1 cup of potato, and a small onion. Stir over the fire for 10 minutes in four tablespoons of butter. Add one quart of water and boil for an hour. Season with pepper and salt to taste, add a small lump of butter, sprinkle with a little finely chopped parsley, and serve.
I was skeptical. Other than pepper and salt, the recipe contains nary a spice and not even a clove of garlic. But I was also curious. So at the farmers’ market this week I bought the vegetables (except the celery, which my dad grew), and went ahead and made the soup. As the simple concoction simmered, I thought about some of the things I might normally do when I make a soup, like caramelize the onions first and perhaps deglaze with a little sherry, or throw in some bacon or ham, or maybe add fresh thyme and puree the soup with a dousing of cream. But I left the soup to simmer as it was, and in the end, it was astoundingly delicious—full of sweetness from the onions and carrots and with a rich creamy texture from the potatoes and turnips. As I savored the heartwarming brew, I was reminded of the happy notion that food doesn’t always have to be gussied up to be good.

The fact that the recipe calls for a generous ration of butter certainly doesn’t hurt, but I also credit its success to the quality of the farmers’ market vegetables. These are the kinds of vegetables my great grandmother would have grown in her own garden, without the taint of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and full of sweet, vibrant, earthy flavor.

The evening that I made the soup was one of the chilliest since the spring. Swaddled in an extra sweater (and determined not to turn the heat on just yet), I was acutely aware of the fact that fall is officially upon us. There are now only six weeks left to take advantage of the offerings of the Portsmouth market, which ends Nov. 5 (weekday markets end sooner). My great grandmother would have been canning or filling up her root cellar at this time of year, but I’m going to fill my freezer instead (I’m not as domestically inclined as my forebears).
   
Many vegetables benefit from a quick blanching before freezing. Just trim and cut as you would if you were preparing them for use (i.e. cut off stems, peel away skins, cut into bite-sized chunks, shred, etc.), then blanch in boiling, unsalted water for two or three minutes, shock in ice water and drain well. Package them in plastic containers or freezer bags. Some of my favorite vegetables to freeze this way are snap beans, peas, summer squash, winter squash, pumpkin, carrots, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts. Corn need not be blanched first; just cut from the cob and freeze. Cranberry beans (and other shell beans) also need not be blanched first; just remove from the pod and freeze. Garlic can be peeled raw and frozen, and onions can be diced raw and frozen.

The flavor and texture of frozen vegetables is far superior to that of canned, and although it won’t be quite the same as scampering off to the sunny market each week, I take comfort in the thought of enjoying the indelible flavors of our local harvest over the long winter.