A welcome will invariably involve food, and never more so than at this time of year. No, I don’t have a tray of warm mince pies waiting. I don’t really live that sort of life, but I do like to have a cake of some sort in the house. Gingerbread in the biscuit tin (Lebkuchen if it’s remotely near Christmas), or a fruit cake. I am one of those people who, even in the twenty-first century, still makes fruit cake. Guests only get something savoury if they arrive in the evening, when I’m eating anyway. This house is always in a state of flux, being an office, photography studio and workspace all in one. But it is first and foremost a home, and I have always been a bit of home-maker. (The only thing I ever made in woodwork lessons at school was a coffee table, because I hoped it would make my unhappy adolescent home more hospitable.)
Our lives cannot always be about other people, love them as we do. We need some time for ourselves. I am never, ever without a book, but I do read differently in the winter. My feet curled underneath me, a blanket over my legs. I will always put another layer of clothes on rather than turn the heating up. I dislike, intensely, an overheated room.
But I am getting ahead of myself. It is the months prior to the arrival of the winter solstice – on December 21 – that I look forward to as much as anything. That first nudge that the summer is finally exhausted and we are slowly sliding into the golden days of another autumn. The slide is often protracted, but last year I distinctly remember the moment. We had eaten lunch in the garden, the last in a long, good summer of eating outside; the dahlias were collapsing into the flower beds in a tangle of burgundy and brown; the leaves on the medlar tree had turned as yellow as a ripe quince; dinner had been, at the last moment, bolstered by a dish of roast potatoes. Suddenly, from nowhere, the smell of drifting woodsmoke, and yet not a garden fire in sight, followed in a heartbeat by the urgent need for a jumper, another glass of wine. The season had, in the space of an afternoon, turned.
You either ‘get’ the cheer of winter, or you don’t. Some are rarely happy in fresh air. They only want to eat outside when the air is heavy and hot. But the mood is changing. We are, at last, seeing cafés hanging blankets and woollen throws over their outdoor seats for us to wrap ourselves in, as they do in Scandinavia. (Sadly, too many are often accompanied by the dreaded outdoor heaters.) I have happy memories of flasks of hot drinks on cold walks, of winter picnics of sugar-encrusted cardamom buns and hot coffee. And yet we have a long way to go before we see the cold the way some of our neighbours do.
The negative vocabulary of winter is well used. ‘It’s so cold’ is almost always said in a negative sense. ‘Yes,’ I usually say, ‘invigorating, isn’t it?’ A sentiment often met with a look of bafflement. We talk about ‘fighting the cold’, ‘battling the elements’, and ‘cold comfort’. The dead are ‘cold’ and we give people the ‘cold shoulder’. You can argue that statistically more people take their own life in cold countries. Yet those same countries, with their long winters and fewest hours of daylight, continually come out top in quality of life surveys. Go figure.
I pick a newspaper article about winter, totally at random, from the internet. Within the first three paragraphs the author trots out ‘bitter, plummeting, battered, dire, freezing, awful, discontent’, and then the ultimate – ‘Snowmageddon’. Finally, with the vocabulary of negativity exhausted, we get ‘Click to see our countdown of Britain’s Worst Winters.’ Not a single word in praise of an entire season of the year. Which is, in an average lifespan, over twenty years of our life. In my book, that is far too long not to enjoy ourselves.
Eating winter – The food of fairy tales
Gingerbread biscuits with icing like melting snow; steaming glasses of ‘glow-wine’; savoury puddings of bread and cheese and a goose with golden skin and a puddle of apple sauce. There are stews of game birds with twigs of thyme and rosemary; fish soups the colour of rust and baked apples frothing at the brim. Winter is the time for marzipan-filled stollen, thick with powdered sugar, pork chops as thick as a plank, and rings of Cumberland sausage sweet with dates and bacon.
The flavours of winter come at us like paper-wrapped presents in a Christmas stocking. Ginger, aniseed, cardamom, juniper and cloves. The caramel notes of maple syrup, treacle, butterscotch and the damp muscovado sugars. Fruits dried on the vine, and preserved in sugar. Ingredients too that hold the essence of the cold months: red cabbage, russet apples, walnuts, smoked garlic, chestnuts, parsnips and cranberries. Winter cooking is clouds of mashed potato flecked with dark green cabbage, roasted onions glistening like brass bedknobs and parsnips that crisp and stick molasses-like to the roasting tin. The food of the cold months is fatty cuts of meat, the flanks, shins and cheeks that we can leave to braise unhindered in a slow oven, with onions and thyme, wine and woody herbs, plodding silently towards tenderness. Meat you could cut with a spoon. Winter cooking is ham with a quince paste crust; game birds with redcurrant jelly; treacle sponge and Lebkuchen, mince pies and marmalade tarts.
Winter food is about both celebration and survival. It is about feasting – roast turkey, plum pudding and fruit cake; frugality – bean soups and mugs of miso broth; it is the food of hope – lentil soup for good luck on New Year’s day and the food of love – the mug of hot, cardamom-spiced chocolate you make for a loved one on a freezing day.
There is a gleeful abundance to late autumn and winter shopping, and a feeling of urgency to gather up things while we can. The last of the late-fruiting raspberries and damsons well on their way to jam; the late white peaches and crisp-as-ice local pippins and russets; walnuts in their shells and green figs with their soft, powdery scent. Late on an autumn evening, as I turn the corner to do my vegetable shopping, the heavy, sweet ripeness of the season hangs in the air, the glowing melons and late plums, the pumpkins and the last of the runner beans. Tomatoes, green and orange, red and gold. This is as good as food shopping gets.
As the season slides into winter – you can feel the heavy, sweet air of autumn turning crisp and clean with each passing dawn – there is the return of chestnuts and sweet potatoes, almonds in their shells, cream-fleshed parsnips, fat leeks and muscat grapes with their scent of sugary wine and honey. There are squashes shaped like acorns and others that resemble turbans to bake and stuff and beat into piles of fluffy mash; pomegranates – I love to see one or two cut in half on the display so we know whether we are buying jewels or pith – and proper big-as-your-hat apples for baking.
The game birds are lined up at the butchers, their featherless breasts kept warm by fatty bacon and a bay leaf. Partridges, pheasants and quail to roast, pigeons to bring to tenderness slowly with red wine and onions, and quails to split, skewer and grill till their skin blackens and their bones crunch. As the winter wears on, we see the first of the turkeys dressed for the feast, fat ducks and hams ready to boil, bake and slice.
That said, I don’t go wholly along with the idea of winter food as a source of comfort and cossetting, solace and warmth. I still want a crackling fresh salad, a plate of fruit to finish my meal, food that refreshes. I don’t drop my need for a daily bowl of leaves and herbs lightly dressed just because there is frost on the ground and woodsmoke in the air. It is all here, by the way, in these pages.
Drinking winter – raising a glass
Nothing changes quite so dramatically with the seasons as what I drink. Gone the glasses of rosé in the garden as the evening light falls, the artisan gin, cucumber and tonic. Gone too the lemon verbena tea glistening