So does chocolate sorbet, as dark as sin. We are in an age when comfort foods are not just desired - they’re essential. What dishes do I turn to for satisfaction when the weather gives me no hope? Just consider… Barbecue And anyway, the evenings are cool, filling every bite with that much more joy. But then, so are the ways of breaking free, with the foods that taste so much better for the solace they give us.

Our season of late summer/early fall doldrums may seem endless. So would a rare trip to Coney Island - two hours in an airless subway car each way! - for the joys of Nathan’s…and for that remarkable, long-cooked corn on the cob, served on a stick, slathered with enough butter to give any cardiologist palpitations.Īnd out here, the options have grown to logarithmic proportions. The sound of ice cream trucks - Bungalow Bar and Good Humor - would do much to rouse my urban street from its torpor. At a summer baseball game, my lethargy would be relieved by a stadium hot dog - Yankee Frankies in New York, Dodger Dogs in Los Angeles. Though, of course, there are other ways as well. Growing up on the East Coast, I suffered through the August doldrums - windless days of heat and misery, where to even move was an agony, relieved only by the autumn cooling and the storms of September, hurricanes included.īut here in Southern California, our doldrums last far longer, as does our summer - well into September and even October, the hottest months of the year, when our lethargy is broken only by the distant smoke of wildfires, which is an awful way to break out of those doldrums. It often was a death sentence for the sailors of old, described elegantly in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “Day after day, day after day/We stuck, nor breath nor motion/As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean/Water, water, everywhere/And all the boards did shrink/Water, water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink…” They were caught, unable to move, with their water running short, and their food running low. That’s the zone near the Equator, where the northeast and southeast trade winds converge, canceling each other out - leaving a region with no wind, where sailing ships would become trapped in what’s also known as “the calms.” “Doldrums” - it’s a wonderful word, born as the sailor’s jargon for what’s technically known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone.

Doldrums map