Almost overnight, the stalls change color: the red of tomatoes gives way to the ochre of squashes and the brown of mushrooms. This shift is not just aesthetic. It tells the story of when cooking stops foraging and starts storing.
In summer, in a Nice market, you buy what you'll eat the same day: water-filled tomatoes, zucchinis, peppers—everything that doesn't keep. Autumn reverses this logic. What arrives on the stalls then has an invisible commonality: it can be preserved. Behind the beautiful late-season colors lies an age-old concern—getting through winter.
Squashes, built to last
Squash is the exact opposite of a tomato. Where a tomato rots in a few days, a hard-skinned squash can be kept for months in a cool, dry place, without any effort. It’s a pantry in itself, a food reserve that you stack in a corner and start eating through the winter.
Nice has its iconic variety, the Courge longue de Nice, nicknamed "the trumpet" for its elongated and curved shape. It belongs to the Musquée squash species and can reach a meter in length and several kilos—one British grower even grew one over four meters long. Its most interesting feature? It is harvested in two stages. Picked young and green, it is cooked like a zucchini, tender and melting in a pan. Left on the vine until mature, its skin hardens and turns ochre: it becomes a storage squash with orange, firm, and musky flesh, for soups, gratins, and pies all winter long. One vegetable, two seasons, two uses.
Finally, its flowers are the same ones that are stuffed or fried in fritters—some Nice producers pick them early in the morning, at opening, to sell them in bouquets to restaurateurs. Nothing is wasted, not even the flower.
Mushrooms, what the forest gives
With the first rains and cool weather, the forests of the hinterland become covered with mushrooms. This is a harvest of a special kind: it is not cultivated, it is foraged, and it depends entirely on the weather of the preceding weeks. A good September rain, and the slopes are bountiful; a dry autumn, and the season is meager.
Then, ceps, girolles, and a host of other species appear on the stalls, depending on the altitude and the specific spots—often jealously guarded secrets by those who know them. A common-sense piece of advice is appropriate here: don't improvise with wild mushrooms. If in doubt about a personal harvest, most pharmacies still agree to check a basket, and it's better to be safe than sorry. For everything else, a farmers' market offers the security of a vendor who knows what they're picking.
As for cooking, they require little: a quick sauté in olive oil or butter, garlic, parsley, and most importantly, not too much water—a mushroom releases a lot of liquid, and drowning it means boiling it instead of searing it. They can also be added to an omelet, a risotto, or alongside a daube.
Grapes, the end of the vine
On the October stalls, grapes mark the closing of the viticultural cycle. These are table grapes, cousins of those that go into tanks in Bellet and elsewhere, and their presence in the market signals that the grape harvest is coming to an end.
It's a fruit we forget to treat as a seasonal product, as it's found all year round in supermarkets. But autumn grapes, picked at full ripeness and eaten right away, have little in common with grapes imported from the other side of the world in winter. On a platter, they wonderfully accompany local cheeses—a tomme, a little brousse—and extend the sweet-savory logic dear to the region.
Chestnuts, the bread that grew on trees
Then there are the first chestnuts, and perhaps this is the most historically significant product on the whole stall. In mid-mountain areas where cereals grew poorly, the chestnut tree was long given a nickname that says it all: the bread tree.
The word is not a poetic image. Dried and then ground, chestnuts provided a flour that replaced cereal flour, in the form of porridges, galettes, crêpes, and fritters. In entire regions—Corsica, the Cévennes, part of the Mediterranean hinterland—it was the staple food, allowing people to get through winter and cope with one or two bad harvests. It was even called "the bread of the poor," while wealthy families had access to white bread. Remarkably, fresh chestnuts are more caloric than potatoes, and dried, they surpass cereals.
This history explains the slight disdain that long surrounded chestnuts—a famine food, which people were happy to forget as soon as they could eat something else. The recent turnaround is all the more satisfying: gluten-free, rich in starch, it is now sought after, roasted on a street corner or used by pastry chefs. The bread of the poor has become a seasonal delight.
Cooking in autumn
All these products share the same characteristic: they require time. Nice's summer is eaten raw and quickly—salad, pan bagnat, tomatoes—; autumn is simmered. It's the return of thick pumpkin soups, fragrant stir-fries, and dishes left on the corner of the stove.
It's also the season when vegetables for stuffing change their fillings, when daube reappears, when the oven is relit after the summer break. The best approach at an October market is to stop looking for what you enjoyed in July and let yourself be guided by what is abundant and good now. That's the wisdom of seasonal cooking: it doesn't fight the calendar, it follows it.
The markets in Nice and the villages of the hinterland are at their richest in October and November. For mushrooms and chestnuts, favor local producers, and never consume wild harvests without having them identified with certainty.
