NOVEMBER is a busy time for city restaurants. Urban dwellers close up their second homes, and market ingredients shift from cool tomatoes to dense squashes and earthy mushrooms. The appeal of eating comfort foods around a convivial table returns.

Two weeks ago, amid all this autumn activity, Stephen Kaye telephoned, offering to sell a whole Tamworth pig. Stephen is an upstate farmer who has brought us the most delicious asparagus I’ve eaten, the creamiest fingerling potatoes we’ve served, mint that made an ice cream still unsurpassed, and my first grass-fed beef, a Dexter-Angus cross. Now he was proposing to deliver a pig the week before Thanksgiving.

My first reaction was: Are you kidding? Do you have any idea of the logistics that go into serving the great American meal to 185 diners? My harried sous chef hasn’t the time or the space to handle a 150-pound carcass.

But then I remembered that this is also a busy time on the farm. It is a race against the frost, to gather root crops and plant garlic and hardy greens that winter over. And of course it is also ideal pig-killing time. Any later in the season, and precious forage or grain for other animals would have to be used to maintain the girth that the pig put on in summer pasture. Any earlier, and we wouldn’t be taking advantage of all the energy and nutrients available in the field grasses.