Olivia Potts

The double-edged sword of eating with the seasons is the glut. A blunt, un-pretty word, which is a joy in theory and delicious in result, but which can feel daunting when you’re facing down a bench full of berries to be picked over, or countless apples to be processed. My husband and I were once given an apple tree as a present. It’s a multi-graft, meaning each of the three branches produces a different type of apple: russets, for storing, bramleys, for cooking, and tart eating apples. This is the first year that it’s thrown up more than three measly apples. Well, it’s made up for lost time; we are, to put it mildly, drowning in apples.

I admit to feeling a little intimidated by charcuterie. I have a clutch of books on my shelf all laying out in step-by-step detail how to craft your own salami or whip up a perfect pancetta. They’re well-thumbed, but not a single one has a cooking stain on it. I’m just too nervous when it comes to the scary stuff. I’m talking about the drying-sausages-hanging-from-the-rafters kind of charcuterie. I’m talking about jerry-rigging anti-pest guards to protect your hams. I can’t quite get past the fact that charcuterie requires hanging meat somewhere in my house, which feels at best frightening and at worst like I’m actively inviting botulism into my home. I’ll say it: I’m a charcuterie coward.

I am, for the most part, a rule follower and a people pleaser. It’s one of the reasons I love baking, which essentially amounts to a set of instructions designed to make something to be shared and bring joy. But if someone recommends something to me, I can be resistant to it for ages. The farcical element is that once I capitulate and try out the novel, TV show, restaurant or biscuit recipe, I inevitably discover that my tastes are extremely mainstream, and I love whatever it is. It took me years to listen to Taylor Swift before immediately accepting her greatness and becoming her no. 1 fan. There’s no good reason for this.

A few years ago, a friend wrote a cookery book for the UK market, full of gorgeous dishes, many of them esoterically British. It was snapped up by an American publisher who, as well as converting my friend’s careful metric measurements into loosey-goosey volume-based cup measures, queried a couple of her more British ingredients, one being golden syrup. My friend had a recipe for treacle tart which – as anyone who has made it knows – is just a whole tin of golden syrup held together with a handful of breadcrumbs and an egg. But golden syrup is hard to get hold of in the US. Her American publishers wanted to replace it with corn syrup. Now, corn syrup may look similar to golden syrup – they are both inverse sugars of a blond hue – but the taste is completely different.

‘Nothing will surely ever taste so hateful as nursery tapioca,’ wrote Elizabeth David. She’s not alone in her hatred of the stuff: tapioca pudding has become a shorthand for those childhood dishes we look back on with horror. It’s exactly those dishes that I’m trying to restore to their former glory – if such a glory ever existed. In fact, the first recipe I wrote in these pages was about blancmange, an attempt to persuade readers that that school dinner staple was worth a revisit. From there, rice pudding was a similar challenge and made way for jam roly-poly, spotted dick and cornflake tart. Though I’ve had tapioca pudding on my dish list for some time, I haven’t been brave enough to give it a go.

Iam standing in my kitchen preparing kidneys for devilling. Snipping their white cores away piece by piece until they come free and I’m left with just the wibbly, burgundy kidney, ready for their spiced flour, I pause. There is no denying that even fresh raw kidneys can smell a little… challenging. And for one moment I consider skipping the whole thing and just having an unchallenging slice of toast instead. I’m so glad I didn’t. Because once cooked, kidneys are not challenging at all: they’re luscious and tender, with an earthy, gamey flavour which is almost compulsive. That robustness is actually their strength: kidneys can take bold flavours – feisty seasonings and rich sauces – which is why they are so suited to devilling.

I have never seen a baked Alaska in the wild. Have you? I knew what they looked like, of course, all meringue cheekbones and technicolor interior, but I haven’t actually come across one. For whatever reason, they seem to be an endangered species – so I took to making them myself. The pudding was invented in the 18th century by Sir Benjamin Thompson (also known as Count von Rumford), a physicist who invented the double boiler, the modern kitchen range and thermal underwear too. Thompson realised that the tiny bubbles created when you aerate egg whites to make meringue provided so much insulation that you could torch the meringue and leave ice cream intact, unmelted, beneath.