Sophie Dahl - From Season to Season - A Year in Recipes

In my last book, Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights, I began with writing that many of our grandparents ate healthfully and seasonally before there was a name for it, eating with an innate common sense and practicality that somehow, along the way, many of us have forgotten. This doesn’t stand for everyone’s grandparents, as I discovered on a book tour to Denmark. A journalist there asked me if I knew what her grandparents were eating fifty years ago. I knew from her smile I was on treacherous ground and took a deep breath of preparation.

‘No,’ I demurred politely. ‘What did they eat?’

‘LARD!’ She said. ‘They lived on lard and potatoes! I eat far better than they would have ever dreamed! What do you think of that Miss home-grown-seasonal-vegetable-garden-have-a-walk-every-day?’

I immediately morphed into a filmic parody of Hugh Grant and said something very English and vague like, ‘Well, yes, I don’t know what everyone’s grandparents ate, hmm, easy to generalize, mutter, ho hum.’ And blushed.

Under the gaze of watchful Danes, I stand corrected then, and speak only for my own grandparents, who grew fruit and vegetables in their garden, buying fish from the local fishmonger, meat from the local butcher and dairy from their local farmer. Every meal on their table came to fruition with an unspoken nod to seasonality and availability.

I am keenly aware that if you are a busy working parent, or if you live somewhere isolated, sometimes all that is on offer (or is bearable) is a one-stop shop. I am sometimes guilty of it myself. But I also believe that if each one of us makes a concession towards being a conscious consumer, we are in turn making an active contribution to looking after our lovely planet, which has enough exterior torment going on in it without us adding to it.

We are blessed in England to have our very definite seasons. Sometimes they feel never ending, dragging winter in particular, but the reward is tangible, both in the garden and on the plate. There is a finite certainty to the seasons that I, as a neurotic ever pursuer of order, find blissfully predictable.

I like knowing that on a damp autumn evening, whilst the wind is pounding at the windows, I can transport myself with a bowl of molten comfort, a soup of squash and Parmesan, served with a thick hunk of buttered bread. This is when food meets the call of the weather, as it’s hard to imagine the summer when it’s been replaced by lashing rain. The memory of a ceviche, tart with lime, can propel you through the darkest days of winter, carrying you right to the moment when you can actually eat it in the garden, as drowsy bees sail past, the air throbbing with sun and lavender.

I come from a long tradition of home cooks. I write about some of them here. England is full of them, hundreds upon thousands of them practically more skilled than I. You only have to look within one of the many branches of the Women’s Institute or similar to find women whose lemon bars are like the tender tears of an angel, whose puff pastry flakes with an unparalleled buttery grace. I worship at the altar of these culinary high priestesses. I still can’t chop an onion properly, and my apple coring looks like the prelude to a horror film. I very occasionally make a cake that could be used as a weapon or forget to put the sugar in something. I am content with this haphazard state of affairs; it keeps me honest. I own an apple corer, and I make whoever is lurking in the kitchen around Sunday lunch time chop my onions. I lob shards of my occasional missile cakes at the voracious crows poaching my raspberries. I happen to be a greedy writer who likes to cook and then write about what I’ve cooked, not a chef, or a teacher. If you are looking for a voice of stern culinary authority, go elsewhere! I can give you stories, and ideas for things, along with food that is lovely, simple and straightforward. No forgotten sugar either, I promise. This book is a collection of recipes that were either written down as they were cooked, imagined late one sleepless night and then realized, admired and reprinted, or passed down by a stoic Norwegian great grandmother. They are all pretty easy, with minimal fussing required. I like honest cooking that speaks for itself, cooking that begs for seconds and a satisfied smile, and I truly hope that resonates from my kitchen to yours.

In the in-between, I wish for you an army of onion choppers, sponge that is light as a feather, soufflés that defy gravity and, if all else fails, a shoulder to cry on. Cooking is not tight-lipped and mean, and it is not judgmental either. It shouldn’t be, and nor should eating. Both in their very nature are providers – of nourishment, family, warmth and community, alchemy and adventure.

So whether your grandparents were lard-eating Danes, Burmese farmers, molasses-eating Mississippians, prairie-sowing Middle Americans or, like mine, a mix of staunch Scandinavian, Scottish Presbyterian, Tennessee hillbillies and vegetable growing East Enders, most of all, I wish you happy eating. Whatever the season.

With love,

Sophie Dahl

Autumn

Autumn is all about nostalgia. For me it will forever be the season of back to school, first loves, and bonfire night. The food of autumn captures all of that in a net. Even the scent of autumn is sweet, smoky and wistful.

From four to seventeen I attended quite a few schools, from the call your teacher Bob and do yoga as a sport sort, to the white gloves and curtsying to the headmistress after prayers, draconian institute that is particular to England. The one constant in the merry-go-round was the familiar feeling that flooded to the surface during the last week of August, the week before the autumn term began. It was a cross between an itch and a promise, as the evenings grew colder and supper was suddenly hot soup or a baked potato. It was furthered by buying tights and the accoutrements of junior academia: shiny pencil cases, as yet unmarred with the initials of the boy who we all had a crush on, scratched on with a compass, and virginal geometry books, so hopeful without the vivid red crosses that were sure to come.

If it was boarding school, which it was for a bit, there was the heart-plunging goodbye at the train station on a Sunday evening, the inevitable pall of rain steaming up the windows, staining the summer with a tearful goodbye. At day school, the first-day rain ceased to be a symbolic backdrop for all that was ill in the world, and more of a vanity irritant, mussing up the fringe that was so carefully straightened the night before, in honour of the sixth form boys.

Your classmates felt new like pennies, and you saw them with new eyes, at least for a day or two. Chloe now had a chest to rival Jane Russell; Joe’s voice had broken and he had freckles from some faraway sun. Lola had a worldly weariness that could have something to do with a Greek waiter, and fat Robert was now thin and mean with it. Our teachers struggled with the new us, trying to gauge our emotional temperature with the old jokes that used to work, before we went and grew quietly behind their backs. So much can happen in ten weeks. Long gone from school, I still know that much can shift in a summer.

Maybe this is why autumn makes me so nostalgic. The tangible chrysalis effect of what’s changed. I watch it now with my younger cousins and the children of friends. Fun fairs and post graduation nights of camping in places that parents would balk at, sangria and sunburn, and thinking you’re in love with a person who can barely say hello in your language. Discovering that some friends won’t, as you thought, walk into adult life with you, that all of those nights spent whispering secrets when the lights were out will be instead relegated to the yellowing pages of a diary.