I ASSOCIATE November's cranky weather with the arrival of some of the great Maryland foods, our scrapple, sauerkraut, sour beef, buckwheat cakes and fried oysters.

Once my grandmother Lily Rose and her sister, Great Aunt Cora, laid down their mops and scrubbing brushes in their annual battle with fall housecleaning, they moved on to the next pleasure. The dishes that issued from their warm and sunny Guilford Avenue kitchen for the next couple of months would make you a fan of these long nights and bone-chilling days.

I always associate scrapple with the fall because that is, by tradition, when the pigs got slaughtered. This was a house where homemade was best, but these women bought their scrapple. I never recall them making it, only the ketchup that went with the dish. I must say, that must have been pretty good ketchup. They made it in early September, and it was all used up by Opening Day or thereabouts. It had no kinship with that made by Mr. Heinz.

The pies also started coming out of the Oriole range's oven - you could always detect the scent of burning pie crust. We had the usual pumpkin, mincemeat and apple, but oh, those glorious meat and oyster pies - great big moonscape crusts tucked around the circumference of a blue agate tin washing basin. There were veal, lamb, beef and oyster - oddly, no chicken. Don't ask me why. People still ask for Lily Rose's lard crust.

Only a Baltimorean's mouth would water over sauerkraut and then not stop talking about this lowly, much revered dish. In this regard, I'll tell this story one more time. I'll say it was 1900 and my grandmother and her sisters, brothers and everyone else were living at 1815 Broadway, just below North Avenue. As was their custom, the Stewarts made their own sauerkraut, along with many other foods and household products. This was an industrious clan.

As the fall harvest was coming in, and the cabbages had grown huge (and cheap), they chopped away. They salted and stored them in beautiful (and now collectible) gray stoneware crocks, which they housed in the cellar until the cabbage had cured - a rather disgusting process, by the way.

This one autumn, they served up the first of the season's sauerkraut. It didn't taste right. But, being thrifty Baltimoreans, they didn't complain. They'd just keep on going down the cellar steps and bringing up the soured cabbage for whatever meal required it, and, I am sure, that year's Thanksgiving feast included.

Finally, they got to the bottom of the crock. (I would guess this would have been somewhere close to Christmas, because the crocks got filled up again with nutmeg-laced butter cookies, also incredibly delicious.)

There, they found why the sauerkraut tasted like, well, soap.

You see, at another time of the calendar they created household laundry and scrubbing soap out of a glop of animal fat, stored-up grease and lye. This process was just as distasteful to observe as sauerkraut curing. Don't ask about the smell.

The soap cakes also went in the crocks, where they were stored until the supply ran out. Well, someone hadn't removed the last piece and that hunk of suds became an unintentional added starter in the list of ingredients in that fall's kraut.