One of the notable negative effects of air-conditioning, besides its environmental ravages, is its flattening effect on cooking. For the lucky souls who live in homes with cold air blowing through like the Arctic, the SPECIAL SUMMER GRILLING ISSUE! of a food magazine is little more than a quaint formality. What’s stopping you from firing up the oven when the air-conditioner roars a chilly counterpoint?

I once lived, for a while, in one of those marvellously insulated iceboxes, where summer was something that happened entirely outside the windows and nothing but a sense of decency stood between me and a mid-July pot roast. I don’t particularly enjoy hot weather—the best summer trip I ever took was two sweater-clad weeks in Alaska. So I expected to love living in such climatic neutrality, but instead I felt strangely alienated. I had grown accustomed to the damp-shirted misery of dinner in the heat. The frigidity of that kitchen untethered me from time. “Did we skip summer?” I remember asking my husband, once the chill of October had set in. (Not that we could tell—the heating in that apartment was just as robust as the A.C.) I was left with an un-scratched itch: refrigerator salads, kitchen-sink tomato sandwiches, piles of sausages and summer vegetables brushed with oil and set to char on an outdoor grill. Or those sweaty, exhausted, Tennessee Williams-sultry suppers: an entire box of popsicles and a glass of gin, or three sticky nectarines and a handful of humidity-softened potato chips, or a green bell pepper eaten like an apple, followed by an after-dark walk through the neighborhood in search of the ice-cream truck.