Oven Bake

A marrow for supper will generally coincide with the leaves turning on the trees, the first early morning mists, new school uniform. Their bulk and their bargain-basement price ensure that they will make a cheap supper. For this, we love them. This filling—earthy, sloppy, and much nicer than ground meat—is good for pumpkin too.

The ideal here would be the pale, plump zucchini varieties you find in Middle Eastern markets. I visit one near London’s Edgware Road that even has them ready prepared, their seeds removed for stuffing, and packed into little plastic crates. If these torpedo-shaped squashes escape me, and they often do, then I use the ubiquitous type, halve them lengthwise and scatter the filling loosely over the top rather than making a clumsy attempt to stuff them. The classic zucchini stuffings of the Middle East vary from family to family but usually include cooked rice or ground lamb, or occasionally walnuts, pine nuts, or hazelnuts, stirred into softened onion and then lightly seasoned with allspice, tomato paste, and parsley. The effect is a moist filling of elegance and pleasing predictability. I sometimes want something more unusual. A stuffing that intrigues as much as it pleases.

A good savory little number this, fantastic with all manner of roasts and grilled foods but equally worth making as a side dish for cool, almost liquid mozzarella or a bowl of basmati rice flecked with torn herbs.

Late summer, the sun high, the vegetable patch is filled with slow-moving bees and tiny, piercing-blue butterflies. The day stands still, baking in the sunshine. The cats lie silently on the dusty stone terrace, too hot to move. It is the day for a lunch of melting softness. I wander into the kitchen on bare feet to roast tomatoes and break open a milky, silky buffalo mozzarella.

The first time I made this, I discovered a wealth of delights: the way the tomato holds the little cheese like an eggcup holds an egg; the point at which the juice of the tomato and the melted cheese meet; and the subtle difference in smell and flavor depending on which cheese you use. Two of these tomatoes are lunch for me if there is something else on the table—a couscous salad, perhaps, or some bread and salami. Others may want more.

Early February, icy-cold day. I find great spinach in the shops but little to go with it. I grab a bag of those factory-made vacuum-packed gnocchi that always make me feel as if I have just eaten a duvet. With cream, blue cheese, and spinach, they have a rib-sticking quality that would keep out arctic cold, let alone a bit of urban chill. Sometimes I just need food like this.

A huge pie, lighter and (slightly) less trouble than a lasagne, this is as satisfying as winter food gets. Even with top-notch chicken and heavy cream, it is hardly an expensive supper, and it feeds four generously (some of us went back for seconds).

The cream sauce of a vegetable gratin is something I like to eat with brown basmati rice, but barley, couscous, or quinoa would be just as suitable.

There are certain unfashionable meals I want to slap a preservation order on lest they disappear altogether. Faggots and gravy, traditional Midlands meatballs fashioned from pork innards and belly and wrapped in caul fat, is one such recipe (lardy cake—the name speaks for itself—is another). Pease pudding would be many people’s chosen accompaniment; others probably a pile of minted fresh peas. To my mind, the faggot needs a cooling sidekick to soften the blow of the liver and onions. A mash of rutabaga is good, but also this rather more subtle approach.

It’s late March and green leaves as sharp as a dart are opening on the trees that shield this garden from the most bone chilling of the winter winds. The mornings are still crisp. You can see your breath. Stew weather. Unlike carrots, rutabaga becomes translucent when it cooks, making a casserole the glowing heart of the home.

Rutabaga’s ability to sponge up liquid is shown to good effect when it is baked with butter and vegetable stock. When it is teamed up with potato and seasoned with garlic and a spot of mustard, it is as near to a main course as I feel you can safely get with this particular root.

An hour after leaving Dijon, I was lost. A tangle of lanes, endless vineyards, and a low mist left me confused and desperately looking for a farm at which to ask for directions. It wasn’t the most poetic of farmyards, but there was dry mud and clean straw underfoot and tight bales of hay on which were perched a hundred or more fat, round pumpkins soaking up the late-afternoon sun like a group of ladies in a Beryl Cook painting. I whistled and called without reply; not even a dog barked. As I waited, the pumpkins seemed to be watching me, growing faintly malevolent in the fading golden light. I felt like a lost child in a haunting fairy tale. Whether it was the watching fruits or the deserted farm that spooked me, I got back in the car and left as fast as I could. Thirty years on, I think of them in an altogether friendlier light, but they are still what I want at Halloween and on Guy Fawkes’ Night. I came up with this modern take on the classic sausage and mash a year or two ago in an attempt to pacify a herd of boisterous and hungry kids that descended on me one October. It worked.

Marrying textures and tastes to one another is one of the most satisfying pleasures of cooking: the soft with the crisp, the steamily hot with the icily cold, the spicy with the mint cool. I somehow had a feeling that crisp crumbs might work well with the soft, collapsing flesh of a squash. They do, but are more interesting when the crumbs are not packed on top like a crumble but lightly scattered over and between the pieces of squash.

Potatoes cut thinly are not only good deep-fried but can be blissful when cooked with stock or butter until they are sodden and meltingly soft. I wanted a sliced potato dish that had the simplicity of pommes à la boulangère but something of the richness of its creamier cousin, pommes à la dauphinoise. This is what I have come up with: thinly sliced potatoes layered with garlic, butter, and grated Parmesan. Savory, melting, and, yes, rich, they are a near-perfect accompaniment for cold roast lamb or beef.

I am constantly on the lookout for potato dishes that will flatter a piece of meat or fish such as grilled mackerel, flash-fried lamb’s liver, or some thick bacon slices. This is such a dish.

There is much comfort, warmth, solace, and satiety in a bowl of starch, especially in cold weather. This one has the benefit of stock too, providing either a simple supper or an accompaniment to a roast.

I say fontina because that is what I had in the kitchen last time I made this—it’s a fondue cheese that melts sublimely and doesn’t overpower the leeks. But Taleggio, another milky Italian, would be just fine, too.