I love lemon drizzle cake, a true Women’s Institute cake-stall staple. But I’ve never been satisfied with the ones I’ve made, no matter how highly recommended the recipe; they never seemed quite moist enough, and the crackly glaze didn’t work. I tried several recipes I found online and none hit the spot till I found this one. It’s lovely and moist and truly is luscious when split and sandwiched with home-made lemon curd. And as a bonus it’s really easy to make. The only thing wrong with Sylvie’s recipe is that it doesn’t make enough cake Certainly not for choir practice purposes. So I doubled the ingredients, converted it to metric, and made a nice large round cake; but you could make it in a loaf tin too.

280 g self-raising flour
2 tsps baking powder
225 g butter, softened
225 g golden caster sugar
4 tbsp good quality lemon curd
Grated rind of 2 lemons (you’ll use the juice for the glaze)
4 eggs, whisked
2 tbsp water or lemon juice

Syrup:
Juice of 2 lemons
150 g granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 175 C and grease and line a large loaf tin or 18 cm round cake tin.

Put all the cake ingredients into a large bowl and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon and then a hand-held mixer for a maximum of 3 minutes. Pour into the prepared loaf or cake tin and bake for about an hour, or until the top is springy and a skewer inserted comes out clean.

While the cake is baking, make the syrup, by mixing the lemon juice and sugar together. It’s important to use granulated sugar so that the glaze stays crunchy and doesn’t just dissolve.

Remove the cake from the oven, and leaving it in the tin pierce the top all over with a fine skewer or a fork. While the cake is still hot, pour the syrup all over the top and leave it in the tin to cool.

Once cold, store in an airtight tin. If you want, you can split the cake horizontally and sandwich the two halves together with more lemon curd.

After last month’s blandfest, it seemed apposite to turn to Elizabeth David’s Spices, Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, published in 1970, for this month’s cookbook challenge. She points out that England has a long history in the spice trade, reflected in cooking from the Middle Ages onwards: “we took to spiced food with an enthusiasm which seems to have been almost equal to that shown by the Romans at the height of their preoccupation with the luxuries of living. A study of English recipes of the fifteenth century leaves one with the impression that to the cook the spices were a good deal more important than the food itself.”

First a word about the book. I am a huge fan of Elizabeth David, no matter how unfashionable she has become, and practically every modern British cookery writer owes a debt to her (often uncknowledged). Her French Provincial Cooking is required reading for any English speaker who wants to learn to cook classic French food. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and she happily assumes intelligence and competence on the part of her readers. But Spices, Salt and Aromatics… is not one of her best books. It’s bitty, parts of it cobbled together from a number of previously published articles, and not very coherent as a result. It’s hard to figure out, for example, what a recipe for paella is doing in a book ostensibly about English food! But that being said, this is Elizabeth David. Of course there are good things here, and masses of interesting snippets of information. The chapter on spices and condiments is inimitable David: a combination of the academic and the personal. Using old recipe books as sources, she dragged many worthwhile recipes from oblivion and played her part in making people realise that English food was not without its own merits. Like all her books, it’s one you can read for pleasure as well as cook from.

Oh, and the cover art is gorgeous! The back cover tells us:

De Heem’s painting shows a seventeenth-century version of a Lombard crustade or pie, a survival from the fourteenth century, when such pies were common to the tables of the rich in Italy, France, England, the Low Countries, and Germany. This one, as the artist made plain by placing a dish of prawns in the foreground of his composition, was a fish day pie. The medley of dried and fresh fruit, almonds and pine kernels, probably concealed the main filling of fish, perhaps salmon and eel, or haddock and codling, ground to a paste with apples and pears, and ginger, cinnamon, cloves and mace.

When the pie was baked the top crust was lifted, a mixture of cream and egg yolks, or for fish days a cream of almonds, was poured in. The cover was then replaced and, surmounted with its decorative cluster of pears, cored, filled with sugar and sweet spices, the pie was returned to the oven until the custard or cream had thickened.

Recipes for Lombard or “lumber” pies survived in English cookery books, virtually unchanged, until well into the eighteenth century.

Everything about these paragraphs, the precision, the careful use of phrasing and detail, the casual erudition, tells me they were written by Elizabeth David herself, not some Penguin editor.

So to the meal. Unlike last month’s it soared high on the effort versus results scale, requiring only about half an hour’s “hands-on” time. The starter, coriander mushrooms, was so simple it was hardly a recipe at all. Toss your quartered mushrooms in lemon juice, heat some olive oil and sizzle some crushed coriander seeds in it. Then add the mushrooms, a couple of bay leaves,salt and pepper, saute for a minute, then cover and simmer for 3 minutes. Turn out into a dish, season with more lemon juice and olive oil, done. You could eat this hot; I let it cool and served it as a room-temperature salad. Make sure you have some bread to soak up the juices. This dish didn’t seem old-fashioned at all; a triumph of simplicity and natural flavours (it would no doubt be better with more interesting, i.e. wild, mushrooms!).

The main course was equally timeless; a slow-roast joint of pork with sliced oranges and a glug of Noilly Prat. I’m sure Elizabeth David expected a traditional British pork roast, with fat; in France pork roasts are always sold boned, every scrap of skin and fat trimmed off, rolled, and neatly tied. So the breadcrumb crust didn’t really come off (not enough fat). But the seasonings (garlic, rosemary, herbes de Provence, finely chopped and pressed into the surface of the joint) worked well with the orange, and it was really tasty. As for effort, I put it in the oven, basted it after 30 minutes or so, then went out for an aperitif, returning an hour and a half later. We had cinnamon-flavoured apple sauce with it, but only because a glut of apples meant I’d just made a big panful.

For pudding, I made a cream cheese and honey pie. I cheated here and used ready-made pastry (well, I had been out drinking). It was very like Yorkshire curd tart; she specified “double cream cheese”, so I used mascarpone, flavoured with acacia honey, lemon zest and cinnamon. Method: whizz all filling ingredients together, pour into pastry case, put into oven, done. Very delicately flavoured and best eaten lukewarm or cold.

I was glad I’d picked this book up; I’d got out of the habit of my Elizabeth David books, and this meal reminded me how her strengths are in such simple, classic combinations. No follower of fashion, she knew what she liked. Again, “things taste of what they are”, but the subtle use of complementary seasonings makes all the difference. And it was so quick and easy to put together. I’ve only ever cooked a handful of recipes from this book, but I’ll certainly do some more.

As I mentioned in my last post, Food for Pleasure was published in 1950, when Britain was still subject to rationing, albeit less drastic than during the war. It’s actually an anthology; Ruth Lowinsky chose recipes from books published from 1866 to 1942, including some of her own. So it’s even more old-fashioned than it sounds! “Pre-war cookery books,” she says, “must not be thought obsolete: their recipes, even when modified, offer incomparably better results than the frightening suggestions devised to suit the times by the misplaced ingenuity of the Ministry of Food.”

Just to encourage us, she adds, “Do not throw up your hands in histrionic despair when inferior ingredients result in a dish that falls short of your old, exacting standards”. With true British sangfroid, she urges us to make do and mend. “You must have forgotten how good things taste when cooked in butter. Continue to forget, and use instead margarine or margarine mixed with lard.” Those were the days!

Then she gives us some suggested menus, with quaint titles such as Luncheons for guests on whom a special effort is not wasted (cold mousse of eggs, duck with turnips, purée à la Jane); A dinner to please your husband who has invited business friends and wants to impress them (Batavia frappé, chicken à la king, salade andalouse, raspberry ice); Little dinners for the girl who lives alone and has a guest (Eggs à la bonne femme, boeuf Stroganoff, camembert in aspic – whaaaaat??).

As for the recipes, there was no Delia in those days. No glossy photos, and usually there are no quantities of anything, except for cake or pastry recipes – just a list of ingredients. The author assumes you already know how to cook from scratch, so most recipes are very short, with just basic instructions. Though indubitably British, they are also very foreign to modern tastes; there were quite a few I read several times and just couldn’t visualise what they would be like (on the other hand, it’s perhaps a good thing that I can’t imagine what camembert in aspic is like). A dish called panna consisting of cooked spinach, hard-boiled eggs, sardines, anchovies, and butter, all pounded together, sieved, spread out on a tray, and then cut into rounds and served on ice had me scratching my head too.

Apart from aberrations like these, it’s clear that in general British food in the 1950s was much blander than modern food. Or to put it another way, “things taste of what they are,” as Curnonsky famously said. Very few herbs and spices are used, and certainly no Asian ingredients. Naturally there are a few mild curries, and other dishes are given a bit of zing with nothing more exotic than mustard, anchovies, horseradish, or chutney.

So, something simple for pre-dinner nibbles: Parmesan fingers, courtesy of Mrs Winston Churchill, no less. Very easy to make: you just cut some stale white bread into finger-sized pieces, soak them in cream as if you were making pain perdu without the eggs, and then roll them in a mixture of finely grated Parmesan and black pepper. In the spirit of wartime substitution, you can use Gruyère or Cheddar instead. Then arrange on a greased baking sheet and bake in a hot oven for about 15 minutes, turning once, until both sides are nicely browned. I used not-very-stale sourdough baguette, whereas I think the recipe assumes factory-made white sliced, so my “fingers” came out looking rather messy. But they were very good eaten piping hot, creamy on the inside and crispy on the outside. I’d do these again.

Then cream of carrot soup. This is a prime example of 1950s blandness. It was a lovely pale apricot colour, and tasted of carrots. Which is OK I suppose, but nowadays you would have to perk it up with coriander, ginger, or orange.

Looks appetizing, doesn’t it?

The geography of the dish I chose for the main course seemed a bit amiss. Brazilian Stew (or Goulash, in Hungary) it said. Well, they are both foreign I suppose. It wasn’t much like any goulash I’ve ever had, because there was no paprika in it, at all. It’s basically a very British beef stew, with winter vegetables (potatoes, carrots, onion, a turnip), tomatoes, and beef, which for some reason is dipped in vinegar before adding it. I think this might be considered to be an adequate substitute for wine. No other liquid at all, except what comes out of the ingredients themselves.

It’s supposed to stew “at the back of the fire” for three to four hours, so I put my big cast-iron cocotte on top of the woodburner, pouring some cold water into the concave lid so that what liquid there was inside would condense and drip back down onto the meat. Result: lots of excellent gravy. Again, I think it could be enlivened with some more seasonings: a smidgin more vinegar, some Worcester sauce – heck, you could even put paprika in it and call it goulash!

Pudding: with 1950s English cuisine, it had to be jelly. Well, soufflé froid au caramel actually. This must be a pre-war recipe as it is rather extravagant with eggs. It is made in the same way as you would make zabaglione, only without the marsala – whisking eggs and sugar over hot water until thick and creamy. Then some caramel and gelatine are added and you pour it into a soufflé dish to set. Unfortunately my dish was a bit big, so I couldn’t do the paper collar thing to make it look as if it had risen above the top of the dish. Instead I just put it in the fridge and hoped for the best. It tasted good, except that it separated as it set, so I ended up with a dense caramelly bottom layer and a fluffy top layer. If I made it again, I would do it in individual moulds as it looked a total mess once it was dished out.

All in all we enjoyed this meal; nothing was startlingly good, but it was plain, wholesome stuff, made with ingredients that are all cheap and easy to obtain. I can definitely envisage making the Parmesan fingers again; really easy to do with ingredients you are likely to have on hand. My adaptations of the other two recipes follow.

Brazilian stew (or Goulash, in Hungary)

1 kg stewing beef (I used paleron, which is silverside in English I think; any cut suitable for slow cooking will do)
3 tbs red wine vinegar
1 tbs flour
1medium onion
2 turnips
4 carrots
4 large potatoes plus a few small ones
3 tomatoes
A stick of celery plus the leaves
Dripping or oil (the recipe specified beef dripping, but that’s not something I have to hand; I used duck fat instead)
Salt and pepper
Paprika or Worcester sauce to taste

I’m sure this recipe would work really well in a slow cooker.

Put the vinegar in a bowl. Cut the meat into fairly large chunks, at least an inch square, and toss them in the vinegar. Slice the vegetables, except the potatoes, and cut up the tomatoes. Peel the large potatoes. Melt the dripping in a large, heavy casserole and add all the sliced vegetables, and the tomatoes. Saute for a few minutes, till they start to soften and release some juice, then sprinkle on the flour and cook for a few minutes more, stirring, till they are slightly coloured. Add the meat, the peeled large potatoes, and the celery leaves, and season generously. Cover tightly and cook over a very low heat for 3-4 hours. An hour before it’s done, add the small potatoes, peeled but left whole, and put the lid back on. When the meat is really tender and the potatoes are cooked, taste and season further if necessary. It really doesn’t need anything else with it, although a green vegetable would be a good idea.

Soufflé froid au caramel

Caramel:
150 g sugar (cubes are best)
3 tbs cold water

Soufflé:
100 g caster sugar
3 eggs and 2 yolks
2 ¼ leaves gelatine
juice of ½ a lemon
2 tbs very hot water
3 tbs whipped cream

Note: the original recipe instructs you to stir the soufflé over ice till almost set, before pouring it into the mould. I didn’t do this because I didn’t have any ice; I just put it in a sink of cold water. But I think if I’d used ice it probably wouldn’t have separated, because it would have cooled much faster and I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time stirring. So have some ice handy. Also, this all sounds more trouble than it is; it’s really quite quick to make (especially if you cheat and use bought caramel!).

Use the sugar to make caramel in a dry pan. When it’s done, protect your hand from any splashes and pour in the 3 tbs water. Return to the heat and stir till smooth if it seizes. Set aside.

Prepare 4 individual ramekins by tying strips of oiled greaseproof paper round them so that they protrude above the rim. Put the sheets of gelatine to soak in some cold water.

For the soufflé base, put the eggs and yolks in a bowl with the sugar over a pan of barely simmering water. Using an electric whisk, beat constantly for about 10 minutes until the mixture is thick and frothy, and the whisk leaves a trail on the top. It won’t be hot, but should be warm. Remove from the heat and start adding the caramel, still whisking. Taste as you go, till it seems caramelly enough. Whisk in 1 tablespoon of whipped cream.

Squeeze out the gelatine and add it to the hot water and lemon juice in a small bowl, stirring to dissolve (the egg mixture isn’t hot enough for this, which is why you have to do it separately). Then whisk it into the eggs. Put the bowl inside another bowl filled with ice, and stir until it is almost set. Then pour it into the moulds, using the paper to fill a bit above the edges, and put them in the fridge to finish setting.

Carefully remove the oiled paper, and decorate the soufflés with the remaining whipped cream. You can use other flavourings instead of caramel – praline or coffee for example, or even pureed fruit. Be careful not to increase the amount of liquid added though, or it won’t set.

Last year’s challenge was a bit of a damp squib insofar as I didn’t get anywhere near cooking all the recipes in Delicious Days. I think it’s just not feasible for me to plan cooking to that extent. But crazily enough I have decided to set myself another challenge that I hope will be more achievable.

I’ve got a little bit bored with Taste and Create and have stopped doing it. But during the 15 months I was doing it, I managed to cook a partner’s recipe once a month. So how difficult can it be to cook a Challenge menu every month?

The theme: vintage feasts. Among my large collection of cookbooks I have quite a few that are over 25 years old, and some that are older than I am. So I’ve decided that every month I’ll pick one of these books and cook a complete meal from it. Most of these will be British food. I’m not going to give a list in advance because I’ll just pick up whichever book I fancy. And that way there is an element of surprise!

For my first effort, I’ve chosen Food for Pleasure by Ruth Lowinsky, published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1950. The jacket copy says:

Food for Pleasure is … a cooking anthology whose recipes have stood the test of time, of taste, and of rationing … Mrs Lowinsky, who is herself a cook of brilliance and resource, makes all these dishes in her own kitchen and can vouch for both their deliciousness and their practicality to-day.

Yep, rationing was still in force in Britain in 1950! This evidently presented a challenge if you wanted to give a refined dinner party, so watch this space to see how Ruth Lowinsky coped with it.

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Use a non-stick roasting tin (I have a ceramic one that works well), or line an ordinary one with foil. Combine the marinade ingredients in a bowl and whisk till smooth. Put the chicken in the roasting tin and pour all but about 2 tbsps of the marinade over it. Roast for 10 minutes, then remove, baste, surround the chicken with the turnip wedges, and return to the oven, turning the tin 180 degrees as you do so. Continue to cook for a further 50 minutes, basting 2 or 3 times with the reserved marinade. If the chicken is browning too quickly, turn oven down a bit, and if it starts to dry up and you have run out of marinade, use some more orange juice or water to baste it.

Once the chicken is cooked, remove from the oven and leave to stand in a warm place for 5 minutes before serving.

Some left-over pastry from a tarte au citron, newly acquired dinky silicon tart cases — I quickly improvised these charming little tartlets with ingredients I had to hand. Makes six tiny tarts or four larger ones. You could of course use lemons instead of orange, adding a bit more sugar.

For pastry, see my tarte au citron recipe. You will have some left over as the recipe makes enough for two or three full-size tarts. It freezes very well.
Filling:
1 large orange or 2 small ones
1 tbs cream or milk
1 tbs sugar
1 egg and 1 egg yolk
candied peel and/or icing sugar to decorate

Preheat the oven to 170C. Roll out the pastry and use it to line your tart tins. Line each with a small piece of greaseproof paper and add some baking beans. Bake for 10 minutes till very lightly coloured. Remove the beans and bake for another 3-4 minutes. Remove from the oven.

Meanwhile, make the filling: finely grate the orange zest and put it in a small pan. Squeeze the juice and measure 80 ml of it. If there isn’t enough, you can add some cream or milk. Pour into the pan with the zest and bring to the boil. Meanwhile, whisk the egg and egg yolk with the sugar in a small bowl. When the juice boils, pour it onto the eggs, whisking all the time.

Carefully pour the filling into the tart shells and return to the oven for 15-20 minutes. The filling should be only just set. Allow to cool to room temperature and decorate with candied peel and/or icing sugar. These should be eaten the day they are made.

I’ve enjoyed a few things from other people’s blogs recently, and these two recipes are definite keepers.

First, Fiona’s Belgian pears. I made a mental note to try these ages ago, prompted by the rave reviews on her blog. When I looked more closely, the ingredients and method looked really strange — cook pears in vinegar and sugar for six hours??? Wouldn’t they be reduced to mush? But I have absolute faith in Fiona’s tried and tested recipes, so small pears from the market at 90 centimes a kilo seemed a good opportunity to try it. They sat at a bare whisper of a simmer on top of the woodburner, and the small amount of vinegary liquid slowly transmuted into a quantity of mahogany coloured syrup. After five hours, we tentatively tried a couple of the very soft pears with a little of the liquid and a blob of crème fraîche. Wow, they were good! As Fiona says, they taste alcoholic even though they are not. And they look most impressive bottled — they would make lovely Christmas gifts.

Although I hesitate to vary from Fiona’s tried and tested recipes, to be honest (having done two batches now) I think you could cook them for less time. You have to handle them very, very carefully when bottling because they are so soft after six hours, even at an almost invisible simmer. The necessary juice is produced during the first three hours’ cooking. So I think the uncovered simmering could easily be reduced to two hours without detracting from the final result.

Next up, the weekly conundrum of the pumpkin in the veggie box. The Open University group of foodies came up with loads of ideas, and one of them caused me to google “pumpkin and carrot cake”, which brought me here. Yes! My somewhat amended recipe follows — no photo because the light wasn’t good and the icing was a bit of a disaster. But you can always look at the photos on Meeta’s post. The cake is dense, with a lovely spicy flavour, and a dark brown colour from the sugar. Good with or without the frosting. Oh, and if you don’t have any pumpkin I am sure it would be just as good with carrots alone.

I made a half-sized cake in a 22cm x 18cm tin, so quantities are adjusted accordingly.

Note: for a dairy-free version, you could probably replace the butter with vegetable oil. Or, I recently discovered almond puree (sold in jars in wholefood shops), which has the consistency of peanut butter and is a good butter substitute for cakes — with the plus of added almond flavour. For this recipe, I would use half and half almond puree and oil, because the puree would be too solid on its own I think.

150 g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
150 g soft brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons mixed ground spices of your choice — I used equal quantities of ginger, cinnamon, and 4-épices
90 g dried or candied fruit (I used finely diced candied orange and lemon peel and a few dried cranberries)
100 g butter, melted
2 eggs, lightly beaten
zest of 1/2 an orange
juice of 1/4 of an orange (you’ll use the rest in the frosting)
160 g butternut squash or any other pumpkin, grated
90 g carrots, grated

The cake is easy to make. Pre-heat the oven to 180 C. Brush the tin with a little vegetable oil, then line it with baking parchment.

Put all the dry ingredients, including the dried fruit, in a large bowl and blend with a whisk.

Whisk the beaten eggs into the melted butter, then stir in the orange zest and juice (keep the rest of the zest and juice for the frosting). Beat the egg mixture into the flour mixture to make a thick batter. Fold the grated carrots and pumpkin into the batter.

Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 30 to 45 minutes (times depend on your oven and how wet the pumpkin is — mine took a good 45 minutes even though my tin was smaller than Meeta’s). The top of the cake should be dark gold and springy to the touch — test with a skewer or toothpick if you are not sure.

Cool the cake in the tin for about 5 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack, remove paper, and allow to cool completely before icing.

Cream cheese frosting
I used Meeta’s recipe, but it was a bit of a disaster. Even after a night in the fridge, it was really runny and certainly wouldn’t stand in peaks. I think my cream cheese must be different from hers (I used St-Moret). So here’s an adapted version of my usual cream cheese frosting.

60 g unsalted butter at room temperature
1 tbs orange juice
zest of 1/2 an orange, finely grated
75 g icing sugar
120 g mascarpone or cream cheese

Just beat all the ingredients together and chill in the fridge for half an hour before using.

Once done, store the cake in the fridge, but remove about 10 minutes before serving.

Our veggie box had two huge chunks of bright orange pumpkin in it this week. I don’t particularly like pumpkin, but one thing I do know about squash is that the first thing you should do with it is cut it into chunks and roast it to get rid of most of the water. So into a 200C oven it went, and I used FoodBlogSearch to search for “roasted squash”. Lots of ideas, but this recipe fitted perfectly with the ingredients I had to hand. “Almost vegetarian” is a good description of me too.

Wow! It tasted wonderful — on the basis of this recipe alone I might buy the book it came from, The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers, and Everyone in Between by Peter Berley, despite the stupid title. The flavour was warm, sweet and spicy, perfect for a chilly autumn evening, it was a lovely deep brick-red, and the blob of spiced cream added a nice contrast. It is one of the best soups I have ever made.

Assuming you have roasted squash on hand it’s easy to make, but even if you don’t, you can put the squash in the oven while you get on with other preparation; I cooked the onions and made an apple crumble for pudding while it was roasting.

I adjusted the recipe slightly; I’m not keen on sage or cloves, so I left them out and used a bay leaf and 4-épices instead. I had some excellent chicken stock from the weekend roast chicken, so I used that, but of course vegetable stock can be used instead.

about 1 kg winter squash
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
2 medium onions, chopped
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
a pinch of 4-épices or allspice
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1 litre stock
200 ml dry cider

Bouquet garni made of a few celery leaves, bay leaf, cinnamon stick — just tie them together with string if you don’t have any muslin

Spiced crème fraîche
100 ml crème fraîche or sour cream
freshly grated nutmeg
black pepper
salt
ground cinnamon, for sprinkling
chopped parsley, for garnish

Preheat the oven to 200C. Cut the squash into large chunks, remove the peel (I find this easier to do after I’ve chopped the squash into pieces), then cut the chunks again if necessary to end up with pieces of about 5 cm. Put them on a large, rimmed baking sheet, pour over half the olive oil, sprinkle with the salt, then turn with your hands to coat in the oil, ending up with a single layer of pieces. Roast for 25-30 minutes, turning occasionally, till soft and beginning to brown at the edges. Vast quantities of steam came off while I was doing this, showing just how much water there was in it.

While the squash is roasting, melt the rest of the oil in a large, heavy casserole (I used an enamelled cast-iron one) over medium heat. Add the onions and 1/2 teaspoon of salt and cook, stirring, for a minute or two. Stir in the ginger and garlic, cover, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook gently for 15 minutes, stirring once or twice and lowering the heat if necessary to keep the vegetables from browning, until the onions are soft.

Add the stock and cider, and use a slotted spoon to add the roasted squash to the soup. Add the bouquet garni and the 4-épices and raise the heat to bring the soup to a boil, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl, combine the crème fraîche with 5 or 6 gratings of nutmeg, several grinds of black pepper, and a pinch of salt.

Discard the bouquet garni. Liquidise or mouli the soup. At this point I made sure I put all the large chunks of squash in the blender, but left some of the onion and liquid unliquidised to give the soup a bit of texture. I think next time I might reserve some of the cooked squash and cut it into small dice to add to the liquidised soup. Season with salt and pepper. Reheat if necessary.

Garnish each bowl of soup with a spoonful of spiced crème fraîche, a dash of cinnamon, and a sprinkling of parsley.

Cut the monkfish into large chunks and remove the skin if the fishmonger hasn’t done it for you. Plunge the tomatoes into boiling water, peel them, squeeze out the seeds, and cut into dice. Chop the shallots.

Heat the olive oil and half the butter in a saute pan and quickly fry the fish over high heat till lightly coloured. Remove with a slotted spoon. Add the rest of the butter and gently cook the shallots and garlic till soft. Add the white wine and cognac and cook for a few minutes to deglaze and reduce slightly. Add everything else except the cream and cook for about 5 minutes. Put the fish back in the pan and simmer just long enough to cook the fish, about 10 minutes. Remove the fish and keep it warm while you reduce the sauce by about half. Stir in the cream and adjust the seasoning. You need a bit of a kick from the cayenne or chilli, but it shouldn’t be really hot — we are in France after all.

A la forestière in French cuisine invariably means the dish contains mushrooms, because in autumn every self-respecting peasant is out there scouring the woods for fungi while hoping to avoid trigger-happy hunters. All we’ve scored so far are a few piboules from the poplar tree in our garden, but luckily dried ceps are always on hand to add a secret kick to savoury dishes.

This Jane Grigson recipe (from her Vegetable Book) worked wonders with the woody organic carrots in our veggie box. She serves them in hollowed-out bread rolls brushed with butter and crisped in the oven; I just served them on toasted muffins. They make a good vegetarian starter or light lunch/supper, but would also be an excellent accompanying vegetable for a roast, with or without the bread.

You could just use common-or-garden cultivated mushrooms, but fresh or dried ceps (porcini) will take it into another league.

750 g carrots, sliced fairly thickly
light, not too highly seasoned stock (beef, chicken, vegetable…)
1/2 tsp sugar
a knob of butter
nutmeg
250 g fresh mushrooms, preferably including some ceps, or dried mushrooms soaked in hot water, or a mixture of both
150 ml cream
chopped parsley and/or chives
juice of half a lemon
salt, pepper

Put the carrots in a pan and just cover with stock. Add sliced dried mushrooms if using (I added some of the soaking liquid too, because it’s full of flavour). Add sugar and nutmeg and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes or so, until the carrots are tender and the liquid is reduced to a syrupy consistency. If you are using fresh mushrooms, slice them and fry in a little butter till lightly browned, while the carrots are cooking. Add them to the cooked carrots, then add the cream and herbs and stir over low heat for a couple of minutes to thicken and amalgamate the sauce. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste and serve immediately.