Giving thanks.

Season of mists and mellow

fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing

sun...

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy

store...

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound

asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies...

AUTUMN may seem drowsy to the poet or the foliage-viewing tourist, but to the farmer, the gardener, and the cook it's the time for a last spurt of frantic activity. Do I have enough marinara in the freezer? It would be a crying shame to have to use canned tomatoes later on because I was too lazy to take advantage of the fresh ones still crowding the farmstands. We don't strictly need any more sorrel-soup base, but it would be ungrateful not to exploit one of the best crops in memory. And for present eating, who except George Bush could pass up those full domed broccoli the size of small shrubs? On my way to the farmers' market I pass a park where the small grey squirrels are rushing around gathering provisions. Me too.

Sometimes, to be sure, as I stand in the kitchen, midway through preparing five pounds of tomatoes for marinara, up to my wrists in seeds and glop, I wonder why I don't just buy the sauce ready-frozen from my local fancy food store. Partly, it's to use tomatoes I've overbought; partly, I've now got the recipe just the way I want it. But partly, too, I suspect I do it precisely because I've never had to.

It's easy, living in a city apartment, to entertain Chekhovian feelings about life on the farm in an earlier and, one would say, better day. But then I think of the accounts given by my mother and my aunts of farm life in the first third of this century. There are few culinary tasks more enjoyable than making pies and cookies--but how about having to keep a wood-burning stove fired up all day in a hot Minnesota August in order to turn out pie after pie and dozens of cookies for the men out in the fields? Having your husband bring home a deer he'd shot in the cornfield would be great, especially with the family's meat stores running low and it still two months till hog-killing time--but with no electrically operated refrigeration, having to get the meat cut up and preserved amid all the other summer tasks must have been frazzling. If we want to put up chard or beet greens or corn(*) we can just blanch it, pop it into a plastic bag, and pop the bag into the freezer--et voila. Farm wives then had to can the stuff; more standing over that same hot stove--and without respite, since what you grew in your kitchen garden in the summer had to feed your family through the winter.

Actually, the kitchen garden still calls its own tune, to judge by the shellshocked tones of Vermont housewives: "My beans have come on awful sudden." Then there was the man who came home one evening to hear gunshots; racing to the back yard, he saw his usually rather dignified wife flinging huge zucchini as if they were clay pigeons, for their son and a buddy to shoot down.

But at least in the northern half of the country it will all be over by the fourth Thursday of November, time to give thanks. To judge from the November issues of the food magazines, there are two sorts of Americans: those who have taken to eating things like codfish stuffed with brown rice on Thanksgiving Day; and those who, however far afield their everyday tastes have ranged since they left their parents' home, return on this day to substantially the Thanksgiving meal they grew up with.

The key is the turkey stuffing. There's a scene in a Dorothy Sayers novel where Lord Peter Wimsey unmasks an impostor by noting that the man ordered whisky and soda at his club, whereas the man he was impersonating drank whisky and water. Lord Peter explains: A man will drink whisky and soup before he'll switch from water to soda.

By the same token, people may substitute ham or even prime rib for the turkey, but if you have turkey, it's hard to imagine being indifferent to whether the stuffing is made with chunks of bread, bread crumbs, cornbread, or chestnuts. My grandmother made the stuffing at our house as long as she was able--mainly because my mother, being allergic to onions, wanted as little to do with it as possible. Grandma's stuffing was chunks of bread, sauteed onion and celery, three eggs, the giblets, and lots of herbs, especially sage. The only change I've made (apart from saving some of the giblets for the gravy) is to add sausage, an idea I got from a cousin on my father's side of the family. It takes all morning and three skillets, and making it is as much fun as eating it.

Another reason to give thanks.

(*)Bill Rickenbacker tells me I shouldn't pass judgment on Silver Queen corn (cf. "Bounty," Sept. 26) until I've tasted his Silver Queen.