Lighter food for lighter, brighter days

Fresh and light and satisfying

With the improving weather – thank goodness we’re actually having a spring this year! – comes the desire to eat differently; lighter.

And it’s also the perfect time to try a few new things.

There have even been days, with real sun streaming down, when it was the perfect opportunity to pull out the salad spinner and rinse off some organic lettuce and winter purslane, and serve a huge plate of both, drizzled with virgin oil and a thinner balsamico, and topped with cheese.

Blue cheese suits such a dish perfectly, but in La Bouche earlier recently, I’d tried one that was new to me.

Beenliegh is an unpressed, soft blue from Devon, made from organic, unpasturised ewe’s milk. It’s creamy and moist, and beautifully fresh and subtle.

Get the right ingredients sourced and food doesn’t have to be complex to be very good.

A number of evenings recently have seen a dinner that was, if not a direct recreation, then was certainly inspired by a Jamie Oliver salmon dish that I’ve recently discovered.

He takes halved waxy potatoes and quartered fennel bulbs and boils them for six minutes, before draining and drying over the steam.

Salmon with fennel, sweet potato and herbs

Then they go in an oven-proof dish with olive oil, parsley, mint and garlic for something like half an hour, before the salmon – with more of the herby-garlicky mix on it – is placed on top and it goes back in the oven for a further 15 minutes.

It’s a lovely, easy dish, but I think a couple of tweaks help.

Set your oven to 180˚C (fan) and prep the fennel as above, not cutting off the base so that the pieces hold together. Retain the fronds.

Finely chop your mint, flat leaf parsley and garlic, and mix with plenty of olive oil.

Jamie’s version sprinkles the herbs and garlic over everything and then tops with oil, but I think that my way does two things: allows you to coat the ingredients more thoroughly and also reduces the chances of the garlic getting a tad burned.

So, pop in your fennel pieces and mix, and then add some sweet potato that has been peeled and cut into large chunks, instead of potato.

Gently stir around to coat everything. Season with good quality celery salt (my addition) and pop in the oven.

Lovely wild garlic

After 30 minutes, place your salmon fillets on top of the vegetables, scooping some of the oily, herby, garlicky mix on to the top.

And back it all goes for another 15-20 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish.

Serve with a good squeeze of fresh lemon juice and some black pepper, and topped with the chopped fennel fronds.

The advantage of swapping the potato for sweet potato is that the latter is a vegetable rather than a starchy carb, so it makes the dish a two-portion one rather than having just a single portion.

Mind, if you use lashing of garlic and herbs, those add up too.

Anyway, it’s easy. And tasty – and healthy.

A couple of stalls on Broadway Market also had wild garlic last week, so I grabbed a good handful of that while the opportunity was there.

The English asparagus is here

Later, the leaves were shredded and blitzed together with some spring onions, chives, garlic, pine nuts, a little salt and a teaspoon of sugar, with enough olive oil to give you a good pesto consistency.

You could add parmesan, but I don’t, since The Other Half doesn’t like cheese.

And an ideal way to use some of this lovely stuff – which keeps well in the fridge in a jar – is to cook some pasta, drain and return to the pan, adding some of the pesto with a little double cream and re-warming gently.

You won’t need to use a lot of the pesto – it packs a serious punch.

Serve with fresh asparagus and peas and plenty of freshly-ground black pepper, and if you want, more parmesan.

A perfect, fresh and seasonal dish for a midweek supper.

And on a final note – and a slightly different one: this is worth reading about the cost of asparagus from Peru.

Ignore the slightly puritanical tone of  “lust for this luxury vegetable” etc, but the point remains that there are severe environmental issues created by a global market for a cheap, seasonal vegetable, sent half way around the world to fill – or create – consumer demand outside our own season.

Jamie, food politics and Broadway Market

Don't smack the messenger

            While I away in August, a storm was thrown up in a tea cup after comments made by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.

Now I wasn’t going to sit on a beach and try to respond, but a wander up Broadway Market this morning inspired me to do so.

First – briefly – to the comments that caused an outpouring of ire and calls for boycotts etc of the chef in question. Would that the same people would call for a boycott of Tesco and the like – it would have far more actual meaning.

Of course Oliver isn’t going to ‘understand’ poverty: he hasn’t experienced it. But that is not, believe it or not, actually a fault.

I suspect, as only a slight aside, that he suffers from a rather widespread British attitude of decrying those who are successful by dint of actual talent – an attitude that really needs to be chucked right out of the window.

He made some crass comments – don’t we all – and was crucified for them. On flat-screen tellies, for instance, well try getting one today that isn’t a flat screen, Jamie. And nor are they particularly expensive.

Still, he makes an easy target, even though his heart, as they say, is in the right place.

Those screaming the loudest probably forgot his restaurant scheme to give apprenticeships to young people from underprivileged backgrounds – something that gives them the chance of a good career.

And then there his efforts to start cooking classes in Leeds market for a very small cost – an attempt to make knowledge and skills more accessible. And, of course, his championing of school dinners. He wasn’t alone in the latter, but his very celebrity made a big difference.

He did, however, raise important issues and these need looking at in a rational manner, as Joanna Blythman did here.

In the UK, we have long spent less as a percentage of household income on feeding ourselves than any other country in western Europe. That has decreased further in the last few years.

We have a problem with obesity. We have a problem with malnutrition, including but not limited to elderly patients entering hospital. Rickets has cropped up again, in part because of over-use of very strong sunscreen lotion.

But rickets – for fuck's sake, rickets: in the 21st century, in one of the richest nations on Earth. If that doesn’t indicate a problem, it’s difficult to know what does.

We have foodbanks on the rise and we have Save the Children having to spend money in this country for the first time since it started up.

All these are connected.

They are connected by some very simple facts: that income has gone down for the majority in the last 30 years, while the cost of living has risen massively.

As a debt counsellor that I interviewed late last year stressed, many of the people seeking help are not spending on ‘fripperies’ – whatever the likes of Michael Gove may wish to pretend. They are having to make real choices between food and something else – often fuel.

The welfare wing of the trade union UNISON has seen massive rises in members – in other words, working people – seeking help for debt counselling, for the cost of school uniforms and for help with heating bills and food.

These are working people, remember. People who get up and go out and do a job that is often menial and tough, but frequently undervalued.

According to a tweet from @BBCFood yesterday, food prices have risen 12.6% above inflation in the last six years alone.

The official inflation figures are part of the problem, as they selectively pick only certain aspects of the cost of living. They do not, for instance, include the cost of keeping a roof over your head or the cost of heating and lighting your home, or of the cost of water or of travel to and from work.

When a one-bed flat in Hackney costs £250,000, that should indicate the scale of the problem.

That was the price in a new development of 72 flats, in a trendifying but hardly spectacular area, approximately five years ago. Half the flats had to be ‘affordable’ and were therefore half that figure for ‘key workers’ – so £125,000 if you qualified.

On the old-fashioned understanding that a mortgage should be no more than three times annual household income, that still means a household income was required of £41,666 – which is well above what most UK workers earn.

According to payscale.com, the median salary for an office administrator is just over £16,200. For a PA, just over £24k. For a software engineer, £32,314.

In November of 2012, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported that the average UK income for a full-time worker was £26,500. That was a rise of 1.4% in the year to April 2012.

However, inflation over that same period had been 3.5%. Indeed, the ONS went on to state that inflation had outstripped income rises for the past 12 years.

So while pay has pretty much stagnated for all but a few at the top end, the cost of living has risen massively.

And that is at the heart of the problem.

Add in moves from government to further casualise the workforce and you have everything magnified.

It’s now appreciated that a major reason that unemployment has not risen in the way that many economists expected it to since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, is because of an increase in underemployment, where people have work, so do not count on unemployment figures, even if that work is only for a few hours a week and vastly lower than what they want and need.

The government has, with the acquiescence of the bulk of the mainstream news media, set about demonising anyone on benefits (well, apart from pensioners, although suggestions have been touted of them having to ‘work’ for their state pension) and portraying benefits as a whole as one of the biggest problems that the country faces.

Even though secretary of state for work and pensions Iain Duncan Smith has been caught out being creative with his figures for those he claims are sucking the country dry by living a high life at the taxpayers’ expense (he himself doesn’t count, obviously), many people remain convinced by the views that have been put about.

The facts, though, portray a rather different picture – not least in that the biggest total paid out in benefits is not dole for the feckless, but pensions. And vast swathes of the rest of the benefit bill is paid to people who are in work – and much of that not is paid as housing benefit.

Given the cost of housing, which has risen massively since councils were ordered to sell off council houses cheaply and stop building any more, the state now has to help people simply to keep a roof over their heads.

Further, the bill has risen because, with so little social housing available, it is frequently being paid to private landlords who are charging far, far higher rents than social landlords would.

In response to all this, it’s perhaps hardly surprising that there are even moves to demonise the low paid.

You can hear, quite often, the view expounded that the low-paid only have themselves to blame. If they wanted, so the ‘argument’ goes, they could simply aspire their way into better-paid jobs. It’s a whole new take on the old Victorian belief that poverty was a sign of sinfulness.

It does, of course, ignores at least two points: first, that there are less jobs out there than there are people seeking work and second, that there are very few jobs out there that are provided as an act of charity, and that workers, whether low paid or not, are doing jobs that need doing.

It’s become especially the case with those working in the public services, where the entire ethos of public service has been damned and those providing services attacked as doing ‘non-jobs’.

Well indeed. My bins don’t need emptying; the roads don’t need sweeping; the hospitals and schools don’t need staffing and the streets don’t need policing. And all the people who do these jobs are really only charity cases who wouldn’t find work in the ‘real world’ of the private sector.

Even though, err, they’re increasingly employed by, err, the private sector.

And there has been a complete forgetting of that hackneyed idea that, for a fair day’s work, one might reasonably expect a fair day’s pay.

Attacks on trade unions over the same period of 30 years (no coincidence here) have also had a negative effect on incomes. Trade unions might not, on occasion, have helped themselves, but they have also been on the receiving end of that same mainstream news media, which has reported on them in an unfair manner for purely ideological reasons.

It remains a fact that trade union members tend to have higher incomes than people who are outside unions. No wonder they’re demonised.

The impact of all this is not just felt by those at the bottom of the pile or near it. The impact is felt by everyone in society.

In The Spirit Level, Professor Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showed that, however counterintuitive it might seem, countries with the widest income gaps have worse results on health, on education, on crime – and many more outcomes. When the gap is smaller, the outcomes – for all in society – are better.

Nobody has been able to concretely refute their findings, yet while politicians cite them, they also plough on regardless, whether through ideological commitment or fear, kowtowing to the demands of big business and big finance, and paying little or no heed to the citizens who make up the electorate.

And here we come back to food.

It is little wonder, given all the above, that many people find themselves unable to afford a decent diet. After all, it’s difficult to cut and then cut again your fuel needs. Or your water needs. Food is not easy to cut, but is easier than those others – if you ignore quality.

The supermarkets play on and profit from this. It doesn’t matter what you feed the plebs, the routine seems to go, as long as you feed them as cheaply as you can – while still making a profit, of course. The horse meat scandal from earlier this year illustrated exactly how the system works.

But the problem is not just one of pay and its relation to the cost of living, although that is a substantial part of it.

Broadway Market, as I’ve said before – including in this interview with the most long-term trader on it – died a death many years ago.

It did so, in essence, because a generation decided, in effect, that it would abandon local, independent shops, and get everything from the big-box supermarket. And because it decided too, that convenience was key and that cost had to be as low as possible.

This is not just about those at the bottom end of the income scale. It's the middle classes, the white-collar workers too.

My mother, for instance, now in her 80s, buys a good deal of ready meals. But since she buys these from M&S, she has convinced herself both that she doesn’t get them from a supermarket and that they are of a quality that is equal to anything that could be cooked from fresh ingredients.

She tells me occasionally, by way of attempting to justify herself, that I won’t want to do much cooking when I'm her age. Given that she has never really liked cooking, and I do, and given that she has long had negative attitudes about any link between food and pleasure that was ‘too great’, and I have no such issues, I suspect (and dearly hope and believe) that she’s wrong.

I also know of a situation (not apocryphal) where a family with the adults in white-collar jobs decided that they had considered that time spent cooking could be far better spent in front of the telly, and that they would feed their child on finger food – take-aways and pizzas cooked in the microwave.

At seven, the child in question could still barely use cutlery.

These are just two anecdotes, but they are an indicator of the scale of the issue.

My parents probably aren’t doing too badly in terms of nutrition. But then again, while they’re far from rich, they don’t have to fret too much about the shopping bill. Many people do. And when the likes of Iceland and Tesco can offer processed food that’s as cheap as chips (so to speak), it’s not difficult to see why they make that choice.

Broadway Market has revived. When I moved into the area, 18 years ago, it was 3/4 dead. When the market started, some people complained – as though not dead was somehow worse than 3/4 dead.

But they also complained at the cost. The ‘£3.50 loaf of bread’ became a symbol of what was happening.

Now I drink and I smoke, and I am not going to start pompously declaring that The Poor should not. Unlike Jamie, I’ve been there and done that, but don’t have the t-shirt simply because all I could afford in those days was so cheap that it faded and went out of shape after a couple of washes.

The poor always end up paying more for things, simply because they cannot go out and buy quality and because they cannot afford to buy decently without gaining credit first. The same even applies to services such as ATMs and utility bills and metering.

But there is also something wrong when someone complains about that loaf of bread – at the same time as drinking one of three pints of Guinness, and smoking.

At a very simple level, why should something that will last most people at least a day cost less than the price of three pints, which won’t? And that’s without considering that the product in question is of a far, far better quality than any loaf that is available, pre-mixed but baked on the premises, at the street’s chain bakery?

Nobody is forced to buy that £3.50 loaf – not least because the £1.85 wholemeal loaf that never really goes off is just as available as it was before the market started up, at the same chain bakery that was there before and is still there.

Our expectations of food prices are skewed by an unhealthy attitude toward it: by a belief that it’s only fuel and that we don’t want to invest time, let alone money, in it.

In such a circumstance, complaining about the cost of food becomes at least as problematic as the relationship between pay and the cost of living.

As I’ve illustrated in the past, ready-made meals are not cheap – contrary to popular belief. I’ve shown, in basic experiments recorded on this blog, that you can often make at least the same, from fresh, quality ingredients, for either the same money or little more.

I’ve illustrated, for instance, that 100% venison burgers from Broadway Market, served with chips and peas, are cheaper than a McDonalds meal – a meal that even many on low incomes will regard as an affordable treat.

In opting for the supermarkets, we have, culturally, abandoned and largely lost the knowledge and skills that saw our grandparents know how to cook a cheap cut of meat for a big family.

Supermarkets concentrate on selling prime cuts. They don’t sell cheap cuts for a reason. They barely even bother to sell offal – but equally, how many people go: ‘offal? Urgh, I don’t eat that’? It’s nutritious, it’s tasty – and for goodness sake, it’s cheap!

There are very real and major issues that are affecting millions in terms of the cost of living and incomes. But they are not the whole of the problem and it is frankly patronising to those on low incomes to pretend that they are, and that everything that is wrong can be righted by a rant at a successful celebrity chef.

I’m personally all in favour of keeping the state out of as much as possible. But as the horse meat scandal showed, as the banking crisis showed and as the ongoing behaviour of the bulk of the mainstay news media shows, regulation is crucial for the benefit of the majority of us.

Government needs to remember its responsibilities to all the population and to put the interests of the majority at the top of the agenda – not those of multi and trans-national corporations that have no loyalty to any nation and any group of people other than their shareholders.

A mixed economy needs businesses and it needs successful businesses. But it does not need the demands of just the biggest businesses being met at the expense of everyone else.

In the long term, most would agree that the UK’s economy needs rebalancing away from an over-reliance on retail and services. In the shorter term, we need to restore consumer confidence.

And we need to get people into work, in jobs that pay a decent, living wage, which then allows them to be self-reliant and to contribute to their own local economies, thus boosting further employment and the national economy as a whole. This is infinitely more sensible than trying to return to the disaster of running a national economy on cheap credit.

A low-wage, casualised economy may be good for some of the biggest businesses, but it is not good for the country as a whole; for the national economy as a whole.

And it is not good for the nation’s diet, which itself can cause increased costs to the taxpayer as bad nutrition takes its toll.

But that cannot be seen in isolation: we also have to stop seeing food simply as fuel; we need to learn again to cook and, wherever possible, support local shops that will also then serve us better in return: a small business cannot afford to easily screw its customers – it’s that simple an equation.

We also need to seriously start looking at sustainability, both of food and of jobs.

For those on the lowest incomes, we need to stop pretending that they shouldn’t even have a television or a phone: try living without the latter especially, given how many zero-hours employers, for instance, insist that you’re at their beck and call, 24/7. Try applying for jobs – or increasingly, benefits – without computer access.

The idea that it is feckless to possess such things, many of which are increasingly becoming basics within our culture, is not only ridiculous and devoid of an understanding of the realities of modern life, it also misses the point in spectacular fashion.

We need better wages for the majority and we need to deal with the cost of living. We could approach the latter by a serious building programme of social housing, which will then help the former by employing many thousands at decent pay for the work they’re doing.

Personally, I’d suggest renationalising all utilities, and seeing them run for the benefit of the country as a whole and not just a few shareholders.

After WWII, the UK borrowed in order to invest – and produced the prosperity of the 1950s and beyond. At present, interest rates are so low that this is exactly the time to do so again to help get the country back on its feet.

The current government has, after all its austerity, merely made the deficit worse than when it took office.

Broadway Market is a revaluation compared to what it was just a decade ago. But the tragedy with what passes for the food revival in the UK is that is almost exclusively a middle-class issue.

The revival has also brought with it new problems – not least in terms of vastly inflated property prices and rents.

Henry Tidiman has finally been able to sell up. Shortly after our interview, he fell ill. In the intervening months, friends have run the shop for a few hours, a few days a week. Finally, it has been bought – and will become another restaurant.

Broadway Market is about to lose its last butcher. Which is a tragedy. And it illustrates that we need planning regulations that do not work against diversity in a community, but help it. There’s a place for a butcher here – okay, not as it used to be, perhaps, but one that takes account of new markets and new attitudes and the changing local demographic.

Just as the street has revived – it has even got a fishmonger and a new (organic) greengrocer – we lose our butcher.

Henry deserves his retirement – he’s worked damned hard for it and I hope it’s a long and healthy one.

But this community deserves a butcher too. A real butcher. Not just a once-a-week market butcher, but one who can cater for the old-time residents as well as the new ones who are moving in.

Would it really be so difficult?

We have a wonderful food heritage in the UK. We have some wonderful foods. That should not be the sole domain of the well-to-do and the trendy.

But the reasons that this situation has occurred are manifold, and laziness and a lack of concern for food and a lack of concern for and awareness of our culture and basic economic realities are part of them. And it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. Or to concomitantly pretend that the solutions only lie with government and regulation, just as it would be foolish to pretend that the solutions are only to do with personal, individual behaviour.

The solutions lie with government – and with each and every one of us, and with every basket of shopping that we buy. And with every meal that we cook.

And in the meantime, let's stop getting bloody distracted by a few crass comments from a man whose heart is, as I said earlier, ultimately in the right place.

Putting school dinner on the menu

Henry Dimbleby listening to school kitchen staff.

Back at the end of September, equipped with notebook and camera, I sat in on a forum hosted by public service union UNISON around the latest review of school dinners.

The new review is being headed up by Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent, the co-founders of the Leon chain of quality fast food restaurants across London.

The forum gave the former the opportunity to meet staff who work on the frontline of school catering.

Unfortunately, given that the Department of Education was involved and had produced letters to authorise their attendance (and UNISON was covering wages for that day), few were able to take the time to attend.

Make of that what you will. But small though the gathering was, that probably produced a tighter and more focussed discussion.

And the question at the top of the menu was “what does ‘great’ look like?”.

Mr Dimbleby observed that there had been “a real improvement in schools in terms of, say, nutrition” since 2005 when the then Labour government took on the issue on the back of high-profile campaigning by Jamie Oliver and more grafting work by the likes of UNISON.

But he added that there were still schools that were not doing as well as they might.

It was reassuring to hear Mr Dimbleby say that he didn’t want the exercise to simply be one of writing a report and giving it to the secretary of state, only for it to disappear from view.

It would, he explained, be “action focused”, carried out in a spirit of complete openness and, if they found “quick wins – things that can be done quickly”, those would be started straight away.

So, “what does ‘great’ look like?” was the question he was eager to ask kitchen staff, as he aims to “create a vision” around school food.

The contributions revealed a varied picture – some of which might not have been expected.

As one member of a kitchen team put it dryly: “It’d be nice to see more contribution from the parents – kids knowing how to use cutlery, for instance.”

For instance, many schools – particularly very large ones – struggle to manage proper sittings for lunch, because they simply don’t have the space for so many children.

But there were plenty of more positive experiences and ideas to be shared, as those assembled there chatted.

Various schemes in individual schools are seeing all manner of initiatives, including using the school kitchen to give parents cooking lessons.

Other schemes include using vegetables grown in the school garden in the kitchen, and inviting pupils to help cook a meal with kitchen staff and then invite parents to taste it (an idea from Sweden).

Unfortunately, these last two fell foul of officials who said that they breached health and safety regulations. Ah yes: good old ’elf ‘n’ safety.

But Mr Dimbleby doesn’t fall for the tabloid hysteria, and argued that that was just an excuse used by people who didn’t like the schemes for whatever reason. And as a restauranteur himself, he speaks from a position of experience.

Staff talked of managing hours and budgets, and formulae based on the number of meals served per hour for the staffing levels they were expected to work on.

Most reported having to work longer than their contracted hours – in their own time – just to get the job done.

An exception was Fay Hart, a cook in East Lincolnshire, who will have been at her school for 28 years next year.

None of her team worked beyond their hours, she said. Surprised, Mr Dimbleby asked why.

“Because I’m the union rep too,” she responded, before adding that she had a contract for 35 hours a week, a rare thing in itself, with most other cooks in her position on 27 hours.

“When they replace me, they won’t advertise the job for 35 hours,” she said. “It’ll be 27.” There were plenty of nods around the room at that.

Inevitably, one of the biggest problems that emerges is that of resources – whether that’s a question of having to budget for a meal to cost between 67-75p per person or simply the time and the staffing levels needed to do the job.

It’s quite extraordinary listening to cooks explaining just what hoops they have to go through to get past managers – to get something like strawberries when in season, for instance.

It was interesting to hear that teams don’t actually want vast amounts more machinery. Dishwashing machines, for example, are less speedy than washing up by hand when you have to get the cutlery and plates back into circulation.

There was a consensus that serving children on ‘flight trays’ was awful – but thankfully, not all schools do it.

One member noted that her headmaster “insists on proper plates – even for children having packed lunches’. In a school with a large number of pupils from deprived backgrounds, the head felt that such relatively simple things were important.

There were interesting comments on the difference between rural and urban schools, with children in the former generally far more likely to prefer fresh food than their urban counterparts, who preferred fast food.

The general feeling was that after the service was moved from “a slow-cooking approach” to a fast-cooking one in the 1980s, it was now having to try the former on the resources for the latter.

Mr Dimbleby highlighted the importance of raising uptake in order to raise standards further: in the 1970s, uptake of school meals was in the 70% range. Now, it’s 40%.

He was clearly aware of the cost issue for parents on low incomes, and seemed to think that a universal free school meal service would be the idea, although as he said, getting such an idea taken up would be “difficult”.

It was a fascinating forum: some of what we heard could seriously depress you, but there was plenty of good practice being related too.

Hearing about schools that do more than simply feeding children – with cookery classes for parents and those school gardens, for instance – was enormously heartening: a much more holistic approach to the issue.

Personally, I was impressed with Mr Dimbleby's obvious enthusiasm and commitment, and with what he actually said and how he listened.

And I got the feeling that the members who had come to tell him about their experiences were positive – indeed, talking to one of the members later, I know that's the case. They found him charming and attentive and genuine. And these are feisty ladies!

One member who spoke to me simply said that they hope that this new review creates positive outcomes.

Okay, do we really need yet another review of something that should, in theory, be so blindingly obvious? Perhaps not, but on the basis of being present here, I have faith that the people given this task are good people for the job.

And whatever happens in the coming months, Mr Dimbleby was certainly given much food for thought, by people who are every bit as committed to doing the best for children as he can be.

• You can get involved with the school meal review here. Please do.

UNISON in education.

Mary, the gift of lard and real roots food

I am one very lucky girl. One mention of my difficulties in procuring lard for my culinary shenanigans and a volunteer stepped forward.

Meet Mary, a hospital housekeeper from the Midlands, who brought me a second delivery of lard and dripping today.

Mary – you are an absolute diamond.

I think chips are on the cards – I haven’t made any since July – and this time I’m going to see what the results are like using dripping.

There is also the question of pies. Only yesterday, I noticed that the Hairy Bikers have a new book out all about pies, pies and nothing else but pies.

Since I seem to have dipped into a state of nosh nostalgia – thanks largely to Nigel Slater’s utterly delightful Eating for England – I have been drawn to pies.

Well, that and frequent trips to football matches where, after the hiccough of Manchester City’s legendary chicken balti pie, I have settled into a routine of eating a meat and potato pie at half time.

If I had an extra hand, I’d get a drink of Bovril too: the other day I caught a whiff of the stuff somewhere and I was instantly transported to a wintery, Pennine terrace where that beefy drink acted as half-time anti-freeze.

Slater talks of Marmite but not Bovril: for me, it's the the latter that has a Proustian quality – Proust, that is, given a football makeover.

Why on Earth would anyone consider memories of being so cold with such fondness? A certain innate masochism, perhaps? That might – until the last few years at any rate – explain my love affair with Manchester City.

But back to pies: with the nights crowding in, I want food likes pies. And I want to cook pies. Nothing fancy – but real big-flavoured comforting pies. With lard in the pastry.

It can’t be steak and kidney, since The Other Half doesn’t eat kidney, and even chicken and mushroom seems too fancy Dan for my present mood.

Meat and potato pie, then. It’s the season, I’m sure. I remember eating meat and potato pie, with black peas on the side, at bonfire nights near Mossley. Jacket potatoes too, baked in the fire. And parkin – real parkin.

Simple flavours. Food that was hot in the hands; warming against the cold and the night. The heat and the crackle of the fire; the pop and the fizz of fireworks blossoming in the velvet black above.

This drift into the joys of nostalgia and northern food took another, unexpected boost on Saturday. Shopping at Euston for fodder for the trek to Manchester, I was rendered nearly giddy with delight to find a pack of four small Eccles cakes. It was like coals to Newcastle: they’d been made just up the road from City’s stadium – just down the road from my old school.

I don’t recall having Eccles cakes in my childhood. This is a different nostalgia – something more collective and region based. This is roots food. This is food as something that is about who you are – who you think you are – who you want to be, where you come from.

And this, in so many ways, is what I think we have lost – to a degree at least. It's not that we shouldn't enjoy foods from other culinary cultures. I think, for instance, that Jamie Oliver makes an interesting point about this in his new book/series: that other foods have become our cuisine. Yes – to an extent.

The French have quite taken to couscous in recent years and it has become part of their national cuisine.

But I do think we'd done a bit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in culinary terms. Don't mess around with a Yorkshire pudding, for instance – there's no need, because it's perfect to start with.

London isn't the only place in Britain – and as such, it isn't representative of the country as a whole – but it seems that the bulk of eateries in the places that I move on a daily basis don't serve any British food.

And there's nowt wrong with pie – any more than there's anything wrong with Yorkshire puddings or fish 'n' chips or many, many other dishes.

But let's not get too serious tonight. I need to try making some of those Eccles cakes too – and it occurs to me that lard might be helpful there as well.

Mary – thank you for the gift today (and for your previous delivery). I promise to use it well and appreciate it. And I promise too to write about at least some of what I cook with it.