What's sweet isn't the sugar — it's the fact of "just harvested"

In a corner of the market sits a sweet one had not noticed before — dark brown, sticky, threaded with grains of peanut and sesame. The vendor says it is called krayasart, made only at this season. A small piece bought: in its sweetness a scorched fragrance of just-roasted grain and the thick sweetness of palm sugar, clinging to the fingertips, that taste belonging to autumn, to the just-harvested.

Sat Thai falls in the tenth lunar month, the season when Thais make offerings to their ancestors. The new grain just in, people simmer roasted rice, peanut, sesame and palm sugar together into a sticky krayasart, offering it first to the monks, then dedicating it to departed kin — one mouthful of sweetness, thanking the land's harvest, remembering those who went on ahead. It is not raucous, a season hidden in the everyday, unannounced; one might not even notice it had come.

Stirring the thick syrup in the pot, the vendor says the recipe was taught by her grandmother: the heat must be watched, stir too slow and it scorches, too fast and it will not bind. She says that each year when she makes it, the moment her hands begin to move, it is as if her grandmother still stood beside her watching. The fragrance from the pot drifts out in waves, mixed with the smells of the market's other stalls, yet this one in particular quiets the heart.

Over at the temple, people come one after another carrying their krayasart, one portion to offer the monks, one kept silently in the heart for the person they miss. There is no grand ceremony, only the sweet thing handed over with care, and then sitting down to eat a mouthful of the same sweetness. The whole thing is quiet, as if speaking low to someone.

Under the trees outside the temple it is cool, cicadas in waves. Sitting to eat the krayasart slowly, the sweetness clinging to the teeth, the peanut breaking apart in the mouth, the roasted-rice fragrance spreading on the tongue and slowly fading. Mouthful after mouthful, eaten slowly, as if loath to finish it too soon.

That taste recalls the things at home that appear only at certain festivals — to tell the truth, it recalled to me something my own grandmother used to cook. It turns out that wherever one is, people use a mouthful of seasonal sweetness to remember the same thing: that some people, though gone, are still remembered by a taste. I think if you too taste this mouthful, you will likely taste in its sweetness a name you have not thought of in a long time.