preserve & gather dinner with parachute home
In the Western Catskills, there is a three month window from the first week of June to the first week of September where we are all but guaranteed there won’t be a frost. In those three months, the hillsides burst with tall grasses and wild flowers and the valleys fill with sweet summer crops. The weeks on either side are less predictable, but come with their own magic. In autumn, the weeks leading up to the first frost are more reflective — they are for harvesting, for preserving, for acknowledging another season gone by. Sometimes, the looming promise of winter subsides for a moment and we are given the space to celebrate this time and this place communally.
The second annual Preserve & Gather Dinner, hosted by And North and Parachute Home, invited forty guests to a 220-year-old farm in Bloomville, NY to indulge in a harvest feast prepared by the team at Brushland Eating House. A menu of braised leeks, ember roasted vegetables, leg of lamb tagine, and bone marrow draped with orecchiette and white beans, paid homage to local growers like Star Route Farm, Stony Creek Farmstead, Homegrown Farmstead, and Chestnut Hill Farm, while wines chosen by Brunette Wine Bar’s Tracy and Jamie Kennard paired as perfectly with the landscape as they did the lamb. Overflowing vesper boards of pickled vegetables, rillettes, and pâte were framed by deep burgundy bouquets of locally harvested dahlias and viburnums from Miko Akasaka of Seasons on the Hudson and bittersweet beeswax tapers from Greentree Home Candle. The meal was set over soft linen runners from Parachute’s Contrast Edge Table Linen Collection and held steady by a 40-foot-long sycamore table crafted up the road by furniture maker and designer John Houshmand. After dinner, guests retreated inside the property’s 1790s farmhouse where cardamom rice pudding, cashmere throws, and a candle-strewn room accompanied the intimate folk music of The Bones of J.R. Jones.
On an unseasonably warm Tuesday afternoon in October, we sat with new friends and enjoyed the simple pleasures of a season. But gatherings like these are far from simple. They are layered by the ideas and the hands that make them possible, by the opportunities they present to embrace a fleeting moment, but to also acknowledge the many moments that created that very one. And for this dinner, with a menu that drew from a year’s worth of Catskills ingredients, set on a century-old sycamore tree, on a centuries-old farm, there are many moments to acknowledge.
Photos by Christian Harder, Words by Hannah Leighton