Seasonal recipes Archives - Pies, Puddings and Pottages

Kent is famous for its cobnuts, a cultivated variety of hazelnuts, which are harvested in the Autumn. This gingery cake is particularly good served with an autumn tea by a roaring fire.

Pears had been introduced to the British Isles by the Romans during their occupation and had been cultivated widely in the Middle Ages by Cistercian monks. The word ‘warden’ refers to hard, cooking pears and derives from the Anglo-Norman ‘warder’ meaning ‘to keep or preserve’. There used to be many varieties of cooking pears such as Parkinson’s warden, French warden and Spanish warden but few survive and so the suffix has been removed. Surviving warden pears include the Black Worcester, Catillac and Uvedale’s St Germain. If you are unable to get your hands on any of these varieties, then I would recommend unripe conference pears.

In the British Isles, where the blackberry is a native fruit, there is a myth that when St Michael expelled Lucifer from heaven, he fell down to earth and landed in a blackberry bush. In his anger and pain, he cursed the berries, scorched them with his breath and urinated on them so that they would be unfit for eating. It is therefore regarded as bad luck to eat blackberries after 29^th September, so Michaelmas is the last opportunity to eat them. This is an ideal dish to serve as a dessert after the Michaelmas goose.

It used to be traditional to eat a stubble goose at Michaelmas. These were geese that had been allowed to roam on the recently harvested wheat fields to be fattened up with any grains that were left on the ground. Sadly, these days, in London anyway, it’s impossible to find a goose in butchers or supermarkets at this time of year as they seem to only come onto the market for Christmas. However, this recipe works just as well at Christmas. After all, it was a goose with sage and onion stuffing that the Cratchits ate in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.