I think we all know the weather’s changing; that this damp summer may be a sign Britain now has a rainy season – one that apparently begins in June. But still, we must try to keep things in perspective, too. Turning to a beloved kitchen companion, Cooking for Occasions by Fay Maschler and Elizabeth Jane Howard, it’s cheering to read – in the chapter about picnics – of the sandy sandwiches the authors remember eating as girls on a beach in a gale, each of them “aubergine-coloured from a short battle with the sea”. I look out at the garden, where the slugs roam like some miniature brown army, and feel a bit better. I, too, remember the mottled legs of freezing cold childhood. At least now I can choose when – if – I wear a cagoule with a hood that makes me look like a Womble.
The feeling that I’m living in a pan with a lid on it – these grey skies! – is, however, playing havoc with my appetite. Notionally, of course, I register the culinary season. At the greengrocer, the lettuces are luxuriant and frilly. In the garden, the mint is threatening some kind of putsch (though not even it can defeat the molluscs). Everywhere I go, people tell me the strawberries are delicious this year – and who am I to disbelieve them? But my body has other ideas, sullenly insistent it’s still winter, however hard I try to trick it (I wear sunglasses at any opportunity, like some Borough Market Anna Wintour). It craves stew and pasta, and will not give up on thoughts of mashed potato. Show it some poached salmon, a few slices of cucumber or a little pile of broad beans, and it feels, not deprived exactly, but slightly put out that none of these things may easily be served on toast, with butter.
But fear not! If fashion journalists are happy to deploy strange new terms in the cause of their art (eg shacket), I don’t see why a part-time food writer shouldn’t do the same – and on this basis, I give you summer-winter food (or if you prefer, winter-summer food), a concept that until the monsoon ends will be my way of both accommodating my longings and dealing with the fact that it doesn’t feel right (morally, aesthetically) not to eat foods that are in season. No, summer-winter food doesn’t encompass melons that taste of honey and remind you of a boy you met on French exchange. But it definitely does involve all the tomatoes a person could possibly eat, the only difference being that, this summer, they’ll mostly be cooked.
Raw tomatoes don’t taste of much without sunshine to coax them, but cooked, they’ll do even in a downpour – and they go with everything. Swap potatoes for rice when you roast a chicken or grill a lamb cutlet, but spruce it up with, yes, some tomatoes you’ve fried very slowly with some chopped shallots in olive oil and a little butter until they’re pulpy and liquid (a cheat’s pilaf). If you’re having beans, whether runner or dwarf, don’t let them squeak; stew them until they’re soft and compliant, again in a tomato sauce (there are good recipes for this dish in Blanche Vaughan’s excellent A Year in the Kitchen and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Every Day). With fish, I like Nigella’s moon-blush tomatoes, which owe their name to the fact they’re roasted in the residual heat of a hot oven overnight.
But the best summer-winter supper is surely stuffed tomatoes, fat and oozing. I didn’t think of it at first – they’re so old-fashioned – but I happened to be reading Ida At My Table, a soon-to-be-published memoir by Simonetta Wenkert about the running of her family restaurant in Queen’s Park, west London (it’s great, and I hope to write more about it soon). At its end, Wenkert gives the reader a recipe for pomodori ripieni con patate: beef tomatoes stuffed with risotto rice, parmesan and herbs which are roasted alongside some cubed potatoes. My eye ran down it, and a chord – de-dah! – played loudly inside me somewhere. The perfect combination of comfort, flavour and a certain lightness (yes, in spite of the double carbs), it’s surely the ultimate dish for summer 2024, and I plan to make it this weekend whether it’s raining or not.