The tiny season we forget to eat

I’m writing to you from a Midwestern season I semi-lovingly refer to as The Thaw. We’ve cleared the postcard phase of winter — the fat twinkle lights, the bow-strapped storefronts, the flattering first snow — but spring has not yet agreed to show up. Last night, when I walked my dog, Otto, it was 64 degrees. This morning at the park, it was 30. The air feels fickle, almost flirtatious, as if it enjoys the misdirection.

There are other tells. The patch of bus-stop snow that’s turned the color of weak coffee, shared democratically with a pack of teenage boys wearing basketball shorts under their puffer coats. The sweet, slightly feral smell of soil shrugging off ice. The persistent plunk, plunk, plunk of icicles dripping into an aluminum gutter — a sound that is less birdsong than plumbing.

And then, of course, there’s the food.

Late spring gets the romance: tender asparagus, first peas, market bouquets staged like still lifes. Here, the grapes that tangled themselves around corner-bar trellises all summer fall frozen to the sidewalk, shattering softly underfoot. You find yourself in your kitchen holding a pint of strawberries that look airbrushed, but taste like wet air. Or standing at a farmers’ market where only three tables have braved the wind — and one of them is selling storage onions, steadfast and unapologetic.

The Thaw is easy to overlook, in part because we have trained ourselves not to see it. The grocery store offers blackberries in January, cherries in October, tomatoes that arrive with the bland composure of year-round availability. Under fluorescent abundance, time flattens. The seasons blur into one long aisle.

Outside, the ground is doing something slower and more precarious. A 70-degree afternoon buckles into sleet. Buds hesitate. Farmers revise their plans in pencil.

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When we talk about eating seasonally, we tend to mean abundance. We mean strawberries at their blushing peak. Ramps that vanish in two weeks. The operatic entrance of the first tomato. The season as crescendo.

We do not tend to mean the in-between — the weeks when the carrots pulled from cold storage bend instead of snap, when the last onions sprout pale green shoots from their crowns, when gardeners study the sky with the wary patience of gamblers. In Chicago, spinach goes into the ground in staggered rows, insurance against frost. Some of it will make it. Some of it will not.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Japanese micro-seasons, kō: brief, named passages of time with titles like “fish emerge from the ice.” The phrasing is so concrete it feels almost documentary: something hidden becomes visible; something held still begins to move. To name a moment so precisely is to insist it exists.

And perhaps The Thaw — this slack, uncertain hinge between spectacle and bloom — deserves the same treatment. Not as prelude. Not as waiting. But as its own condition of being.

While this stretch can feel gray and suspended, the cookbooks tell a different story. When I consulted some favorites like “A Taste of Spring,” Angela Clutton’s “Seasoning” and the gently tide-marked pages of “First, Catch,” I realized early March is less a void than a handoff. Winter loosens its grip, but does not disappear. Spring enters tentatively, leaf by leaf.

Artichokes arrive looking like small medieval weapons. Asparagus, too, still slender and tight-fisted. Broccoli and spinach, dark and mineral. Kale and bok choy with their cool, lacquered leaves. Citrus lingers — oranges, grapefruit, tangerines — holding onto the last of their brightness like a lantern carried through fog. Radishes snap. Carrots, if you’re lucky, still taste faintly of earth and sugar.

It is not a season of excess. It is a season of overlap. These are the days that smell faintly of iron and wet bark. They ask you to cook with what remains rather than what dazzles.

If I were to name it more plainly, I might call it Beatrix Potter weather: damp cuffs, garden gates, the feeling that something is pushing up just beneath the soil. The sort of days that make you want to raid Mr. McGregor’s garden not out of greed, but out of hunger for green.

Perhaps I realized, fittingly, this is the only time of year I truly crave carrot soup.

Not the silken, restaurant version piped into porcelain. The simple, stovetop kind: winter onions, softening in butter; carrots — either sweet from cold storage or newly pulled and still a little tender — sliced into coins. Stock, poured without ceremony. A swipe of miso, if you have it. A glug of cream.

Let it simmer until the edges blur. Blend. Taste.

Then tip it toward spring. A fistful of chopped dill or thyme. A grate of orange zest — carrot and citrus are conspirators this time of year. Maybe a squeeze of lemon if the day demands brightness. The result is neither winter nor spring, but something that holds both: earthy, sweet, quietly radiant.

The Thaw in a bowl.

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