There is a moment in the year when the air turns heavier than hot, when the August light weighs on the orchards like a warm hand.
The cicadas grow less insistent; after the shower, the earth breathes out a smell of wet stone and hay.
Summer is not over, autumn has not begun: this is the in-between, the long end of summer.
A season our Western calendars do not name, and that China, for its part, has always known how to read.
The fifth season
Where the West counts four seasons, Chinese thought distinguishes five, each tied to one of the five phases, the Wǔ Xíng.
The Wood of spring and the Fire of summer are followed by Earth (土 tǔ), before the Metal of autumn and the Water of winter close the cycle.
Earth does not occupy a season outright: it is the pivot, the threshold that links all the others.
It is traditionally placed in that humid late season running from the end of summer to the first cool spells, the “long summer”, 長夏 cháng xià.
It is the center.
Like the ground beneath our steps, it bears, it receives, it transforms.
It is the season of ripening: the grain swells, the fruits grow heavy, the sap begins to go back down towards the root.
Nothing grows faster now; everything finishes ripening.
Spleen, sweet flavor, yellow color
To each phase the tradition attaches an organ, a flavor, a color, a quality of the climate; a play of correspondences that is not a physician’s doctrine but a grammar of the world, a way of ordering the sensible.
To Earth it symbolically links the Spleen and the Stomach, the sweet flavor (甘 gān), the color yellow and the damp of the late season.
Yellow is that of millet and maize, of the gourds as they ripen, of the loess soil from which Chinese civilization was born.
The sweet is not sugar: it is the round sweetness of rice, of the sweet potato, of the chestnut, of the jujube; those flavors that classical dietetics places among the “sweet” ones and attaches to the center.
To cook sweet, in this season, is to cook simply and roundly, without assaulting the palate: a way of tasting the calm of the year’s high noon.
The art of settling
If summer was expansion, dispersal, a rise towards the outside, Earth invites the opposite gesture: to come back to the center, to settle.
Settling here is no rule of hygiene, it is a way of inhabiting time.
One slows down, one cooks longer, one prefers the warm to the ice-cold.
The damp of the late season, that mugginess that weighs down the August air, the tradition holds for the dominant note of the moment, and the whole seasonal table follows from it: less raw, less cold, more dishes simmered, aromatic and sweet.
Worth discovering
This season of the center calls for round flavors and warm rituals.
The Eight Treasures Infusion - 八宝茶 (Ba Bao Cha), with its jujubes, its berries and its dried fruit, is a cup of the end of summer par excellence: sweet, amber, to be steeped at length in the afternoon as it grows warm.
For the kitchen, Dried ginger - 干姜 (Gan Jiang) scents broths and compotes with a spiced warmth that classical dietetics places among the pungent and warm flavors.
Fennel seeds - 小茴香 (Xiao Hui Xiang), with their aniseed aroma, slip readily into a court-bouillon, a pan of late-season vegetables or a homemade infusion.
Three ways of entering, through taste, into the yellow color of Earth.
Towards the turning point
The long end of summer is not a season that settles in: it is a threshold.
In a few days a discreet breath will come to mark its turning point...
Lìqiū, the “beginning of autumn”, which announces the cold to come even as the heat lingers.
Earth, for its part, will go on working in silence, ripening what the year has sown.
