The Taste of August: Mediterranean Recipes for a Late-Summer Table
- Kerridwen Green
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
A simple, late-summer menu for eating August while it lasts.
There are some things you should only eat when they're wonderful... Tomatoes that actually taste of tomatoes. Figs soft enough to split between your fingers. Peaches so ripe they're best eaten over the sink. Basil by the handful.
August isn't the month for doing very much to food. It's the month for buying it at exactly the right moment, putting it on a beautiful outdoor table and getting out of its way.
Across the Mediterranean, markets and gardens are overflowing with heavy and fragrant produce that needs very little persuasion to become lunch. Peaches and nectarines are at their sweetest. Aubergines, courgettes and peppers have spent months in the sun. Melons and watermelons are juicy and refreshing, while figs are in abundance.
Eating seasonally is often discussed in terms of sustainability — fewer resources, shorter journeys, supporting local growers — and those things matter. A lot. But there is another, rather more immediate reason to do it:
Food simply tastes better when you eat it at the right time.
And perhaps that's the loveliest thing about seasonal living: the more sustainable choice doesn't always have to feel like the virtuous one. Sometimes it's simply the more pleasurable one.
Mediterranean Summer Menu Recipes
This isn't really a menu that requires recipes in the traditional sense. It's more of an assembly, with a few very good ingredients, something cold to drink, bread on the table and, ideally, nowhere particularly urgent to be afterwards.
Tomato, Peach & Burrata Salad
Tomatoes and peaches might sound like unlikely companions until you eat them together.
The acidity of a properly ripe tomato cuts through the sweetness of the peach, while burrata turns the whole thing into something substantial enough to become lunch.
Ingredients for 4 people:
4–5 ripe tomatoes, ideally a mixture of varieties and sizes
2 ripe peaches or nectarines
1 large burrata cheese
A generous handful of fresh basil
Extra-virgin olive oil
Flaky sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
A small handful of toasted almonds, optional
A little good balsamic or sherry vinegar, optional
Method:
Cut the tomatoes irregularly — wedges, halves, thick slices. Whatever suits your fancy because perfect uniformity isn't particularly useful here.
Slice the peaches into wedges and arrange them amongst the tomatoes on a large plate.
Tear the burrata open over the centre.
Scatter generously with basil and, if using them, toasted almonds.
Finish with a generous drizzle of good olive oil, a sprinkle of sea salt and ground black pepper.
Taste before adding vinegar. Good August tomatoes usually provide plenty of acidity of their own. If they need a little help, add just a few drops.
Serve immediately with bread (see below) to soak up anything that remains on the plate.
Add Grilled Bread with Garlic & Olive Oil
Okay. This barely qualifies as a recipe, which is precisely why it belongs at an August table.
Cut good sourdough or country bread into thick slices and toast it on a barbecue, griddle pan or under the grill until crisp at the edges but still soft and chewy inside.
While the bread is warm, rub one side lightly with a cut clove of garlic.
Drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil.
Add a pinch of flaky salt.
That's it.
Use it to scoop up the burrata, tomato juices and ol
ive oil from the salad plate. Leaving those behind would be a terrible waste (and Mediterranean sacrilege).
And If You Want Something More Substantial...
Add whatever suits the evening:
A simply grilled local fish — sea bass if that sounds good — finished with extra-virgin olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, chopped parsley and a few fresh thyme leaves works beautifully.
So does grilled chicken marinated in lemon, olive oil, garlic, pepper and rosemary. Nothing more, nothing less.
For a completely plant-based table, cut and grill thick slices of aubergine, courgette and peppers until soft and slightly charred. Cook with garlic, and you can add paprika, lemon zest and thyme for extra flavour. then dress them while warm with olive oil, lemon, pepper and sea salt.
There is no need to turn any of them into a complicated recipe. The point is to let summer taste like summer.
Dessert? Fresh Figs, Yoghurt & Honey
Dessert should require even less effort.
Ingredients for 4 people:
4-8 ripe fresh figs
Thick, natural Greek yoghurt
A handful of walnuts or pistachios
A little honey
Optional: orange zest
Method:
Spoon the yoghurt into four small bowls.
Quarter the figs and add them to the yoghurt.
Scatter over the nuts.
Finish with a small drizzle of honey.
A little finely grated orange zest is lovely if you have one nearby.
You could use mascarpone instead of yoghurt if you want something richer, although on a hot August evening the slight sharpness of yoghurt is difficult to beat.
What to Look for in August
Exactly what's in season will depend on where you live, but around the Mediterranean, August is particularly generous. Look for tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgettes, cucumbers, green beans, melons, watermelons, peaches, nectarines, plums, figs and plenty of fresh herbs.
Rather than deciding exactly what you're going to cook before shopping, try reversing the process:
Go to the market.
See what looks extraordinary.
Then decide what dinner is.
It's a small change, but it puts seasonality back where it belongs: not on a list of things we're supposed to do, but in the ordinary pleasure of choosing something because right now, it is wonderful.
The Pleasure of Waiting
Seasonal eating also brings back something modern food culture has largely removed: anticipation.
When almost everything is available almost all year, very little gets the chance to be special.
There is pleasure in waiting for the first good figs. In eating tomatoes constantly for a few glorious months and then becoming thoroughly bored of them. In noticing the first autumn mushrooms, the arrival of citrus, spring asparagus or strawberries that finally smell like strawberries again.
Seasonality gives the year a rhythm. And perhaps we don't need every pleasure to be available to us all the time. Some things are better because we wait for them.
So eat the peaches now.
Buy too many tomatoes.
Put basil on everything.
And when the figs arrive, eat those too.
August won't last forever. That's rather the point. Enjoy your Mediterranean summer recipe, one bite at a time.
Happy Summer!
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