The Christmas Chronicles: Notes, stories & 100 essential recipes for midwinter. Nigel Slater

beating together the eggs and milk. Beat in a little salt and the flour. Don’t worry about any small lumps. Pull the leaves from the thyme and stir them into the batter, then leave to rest for twenty minutes. Set the oven at 220°C/Gas 7.

      Evenly brown the cocktail chipolatas in a little oil or bacon fat. When they are done, add the marmalade and the cranberries to the pan and toss the sausages in it to coat them evenly. Pour the fat, together with the groundnut oil or dripping, into a 22cm round metal dish or similar baking tin, add the marmalade-coated sausages and place in the oven to get hot.

      When the oil and sausages are really hot, add the batter and return to the oven immediately. Bake for twenty-five to thirty minutes, until the batter is golden and puffed around the edges. Serve immediately.

      19 NOVEMBER

      Planting bulbs and a lamb boulangère

      I have spent winters deep in the Worcestershire countryside, on the Cornish coast, the Yorkshire moors and in the Black Country. I have trudged through the snow in the Italian Alps, the Norwegian forests and the Icelandic lava fields. I have run from saunas to freezing ice pools in Finland and rolled in the snow after many a steaming hillside onsen in Japan. And yet it is still winter in the city that I find most entrancing.

      London in the snow is breathtaking, especially if you can catch it before others wake. Ghostly footprints there will always be – a fox, a postman or a clubber returning home – but if you can rise before six after snow has fallen during the night you will see the city differently. A scene straight from Dickens. Amsterdam, Vienna, Kyoto and Bergen are enchanting blanketed by snow, as if made for deepest winter, but it is London that becomes a different city after a fall of snow.

      People say that you only appreciate the cold if you are in the warm. They insist a snowy garden is at its best when viewed from the window of a toasty kitchen. I must disagree. Waking up on an icy morning, I can’t wait to be outside. Showered, cup of coffee in hand, I am out of the kitchen door before a single word is written. My boots crunching on frosty gravel, the piercing air stinging my sinuses, the icy chill brings with it a sudden shot of energy.

      As a teenager I had more than enough time to walk in the cold. The school bus couldn’t make it up the hill on snowy mornings, and there was no choice but to walk an hour either way. I revelled in it, even then. Each branch, every snowdrift, each frozen puddle held a secret. Mittens were made to be frozen stiff. Wellingtons were invented to be filled with snow. Serene fields had to be stamped through. Frozen water, a pond, a stream, the water in a bucket all had to be shattered. (I was furious that the ice on the garden pond had to be thawed slowly, using hot kettles from the Aga, so as not to shock my Dad’s precious goldfish.)