enough for 4

peeled and seeded pumpkin – 300g
plain flour – 140g
bicarbonate of soda – half a teaspoon
salt – half a teaspoon
butter – 70g
an egg, beaten
warm milk – 90ml
thyme leaves – 2 teaspoons
a little oil or butter

Cut the pumpkin into large chunks and steam until tender enough to mash. Set the oven to 200°C/Gas 6.

Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt in a large bowl. Cut the butter into small chunks and rub it in with your fingertips. You could do this in a food processor, but it hardly seems worth the washing up.

Crush the pumpkin with a potato masher, then beat in the egg, followed by the milk and thyme leaves. Scoop this into the flour mixture and mix well. Season with black pepper.

Warm a heavy, non-stick frying pan with a metal handle over a low to moderate heat. Melt a little oil or butter in it, then pile in the dough and smooth it flat. Leave to cook over a low heat till the underside is pale gold. Lightly oil a dinner plate. Loosen the underside of the scone with the help of a palette knife. Put the plate over the top of the pan, then, holding the plate in place, tip the pan so that the scone falls on to the plate. Slide the scone back into the frying pan and cook the other side for four or five minutes. Put the pan in the oven for seven minutes or until the scone is lightly set in the middle.

Turn the scone out of the pan and slice into thick wedges. Serve warm, with cheese or some grilled bacon.

And more on pumpkins…

• The sweetness of the pumpkin and winter squash family works best with something very savoury. I often marry slow-cooked sausages, whose skins have turned sticky, with sweet and fluffy pumpkin mash.
• Once a pumpkin has been cut, its storage time is substantially reduced. Rather than covering a wedge of it with clingfilm, which encourages it to sweat, I store it in the fridge unwrapped, then just shave a wafer-thin slice off its edge and discard it each time I use it.
• I have never been convinced about winter squash with fish in the same way that I have about the delights of summer squash and courgettes. The extra sweetness is difficult to match with anything piscine. That said, prawns can work well enough with pumpkin in an Asian-style soup, as will scallops if you cook them on a hot grill so that a golden crust forms on the outside, then eat them with pumpkin purée.
• A pumpkin that sounds hollow when tapped will keep better than one where there is no sound at all. The really large members of the winter squash family can be intimidating.
• It is probably a good idea for new cooks to start with one of the smaller ‘onion’ squash, which have much of the colour and flavour of the big boys but are a jolly sight easier to handle.

Nigel Slater’s latest cookbook, Tender, Volume One: A cook and his vegetable patch, is published by Fourth Estate on the 17th of September. With over 400 new recipes, Tender chronicles the things we eat – from the vegetable patch to the kitchen table.

enough for 4 with rice or Indian breads

onions – 2 medium
ginger – a fat, thumb-sized piece
garlic – 3 cloves
a mixture of parsnip, swede, carrots, Jerusalem artichokes – 1.5kg in total
cashews – 100g
green cardamom pods – 6
cumin seeds – 2 teaspoons
coriander seeds – 3 teaspoons
vegetable or sunflower oil, or butter – 2 tablespoons
ground turmeric – 2 teaspoons
chilli powder – half a teaspoon
a cinnamon stick
green chillies – 2 smallish ones, depending on their heat, thinly sliced
single or double cream – 150ml
thick natural yoghurt – 150g
fresh coriander, chopped

Peel the onions, cut them into large pieces, then blitz in a food processor till roughly minced – you don’t want a sloppy purée. Peel and roughly grate the ginger on the coarse side of a grater. Peel and finely slice the garlic cloves. Peel and coarsely chop the vegetables. Roughly chop half of the cashews.

Now deal with the spices: open the cardamom pods with your nails and scrape out the seeds, then crush them to a gritty powder. Grind the cumin and coriander seeds to a fine powder.

Put the oil or butter into a deep, heavy-bottomed pan and stir in the onions, letting them soften but not colour. Stir in the grated ginger and sliced garlic, continue cooking over a gentle heat for a couple of minutes, then introduce the spices – cardamom, cumin, coriander, turmeric, chilli powder and the cinnamon stick. Continue cooking, stirring for a couple of minutes, until the fragrance of the spices begins to rise, then add the chopped root vegetables and the chopped nuts. Season with the thinly sliced chillies, salt and black pepper.

Stir in 750ml water, partially cover with a lid and leave to simmer gently for forty-five to fifty minutes, till the roots are tender to the point of a knife. Toast the reserved whole cashews.

Carefully introduce the cream and yoghurt to the pan, allowing them to heat through but not boil. Should the mixture boil, it will curdle, and though the flavour will be fine the grainy texture will be offputting. Check the seasoning, adding more salt or pepper if necessary. Scatter over the toasted cashews and some chopped coriander.

And more on Parsnips…

• Due to their excellent storage qualities, parsnips are in the shops all year. At their best after a good frost, their sweetness is welcome in any month from Ocober to March. They feel awkward in summer.
• I have been known to stick a box of them outside when there is frost around. They seem all the sweeter for it.
• The small, round parsnips that appear in late summer are exceptionally mild (one could say tasteless) but are good for introducing the root to sceptical newcomers.
• I have very little spare room in my vegetable patch, so I plant no parsnips. They hog a lot of space throughout summer.
• The sweetness of this root is particularly appropriate with beef and all the game birds and ravishing with offal. Mashed, it forms a sincere partnership with liver, bacon, lamb shanks and oxtail. This is not the vegetable to force into a marriage with fish. It is just plain wrong.
• The sweet mash likes some gravy to play with. I include it on the side of uncuous, sloppily sauced suppers like braised oxtail, ham and parsley sauce, lamb stew and liver and sausage hotpot.
• Parsnip chips rarely crisp as successfully as potato ones. But blanching or steaming the vegetable first, then frying it once in hot oil, then again in very, very hot oil will bring us as near as we can get.
• If you grow parsnips, they will keep splendidly in the ground till you need them. If you buy them, then try to find dirty ones. The presence of soil seems to have a preserving effect. I keep mine in a cool scullery (the coldest room in the house) in a brown paper bag. They remain in fine condition for a week or more. The fridge is fine too, even more so if you wrap them in newspaper.

Nigel Slater’s latest cookbook, Tender, Volume One: A cook and his vegetable patch, is published by Fourth Estate on the 17th of Semptember. With over 400 new recipes, Tender chronicles the things we eat – from the vegetable patch to the kitchen table.

People walk past clutching their haddock and chips. You can smell the warm paper, the piercing vinegar, and can almost taste the salty batter. Your breath forms clouds in the frosty night air. You rub your hands together. You wait, and you wait.

Finally you get your hands on your own hot parcel. You find a wall to sit on, and peel back the white paper. The batter is still crisp, the fish comes away in thick, chalk-white flakes. You inhale what seems to be, for that moment in the cold night air, the most perfect smell in the world. A smell steeped in nostalgia, gluttony and national pride. A smell to beat off all comers — the garlic notes of the stir-fry, the soft dough-n-cheese scent of the pizza, the warm, wet-lettuce aroma of the Big Mac. Waves of heat, acid, salt and ozone rise in a cloud into the frost-etched air. A perfect moment.

Visitors from abroad, and indeed anyone born less than fifteen years ago, must wonder how the inhabitants of this country earned their reputation as such consummate lovers of fish and chips. Even now one assumes there is a friendly chippy frying tonight on every corner, even though it was probably long ago replaced by a branch of Starbucks.

Those that have survived are either the best of their kind, serving fresh fish in light-as-a-feather batter and hand-cut chips to a discerning, grateful clientele, or have diversified to offer a little Chinese on the side. It is almost impossible to find a seriously good chippy in London’s West End, so the classic British night out of a film followed by fish and chips eaten from the paper is something easier done by the seaside.

It is of course purely coincidental that the decline of the chippie started around the same time they stopped wrapping our cod and chips in old newspaper. We can’t blame the health inspectors for everything, but certainly some magic was lost once your chips no longer came with something to read. The smell of hot, greasy newsprint is perhaps the best seasoning a fish can have.

The fish-and-chip business has had more bad luck thrown at it than seems fair. The emergence of the burger bars and kebab shops, the massive rise in high-street rates that have seen off all but the biggest retailing names, the health lobby and now, to cap it all, the nation’s dwindling fish stocks. It’s a wonder any are still in business.

Those who peddle frozen fish clad in batter as thick as their shop’s Formica counter tops, with jars of sad pickled eggs and a lone, armour-plated saveloy waiting patiently for someone drunk enough to order it, are still around. They exist out of necessity. During the day they provide cheap(ish) sustenance to those who cannot cook. At night they are a safe harbour for anyone who has drunk enough not to care what they put in their mouth.

It is difficult to know whether the fish and chip is on the brink of extinction or a comeback. Some enterprising soul may well see the gaping hole that has appeared in the takeaway food market. But what form should our fish-and-chip suppers take in the twenty-first century? We have much to learn from the Japanese, with their gossamer-thin tempura batter. Could a lighter coating, barely strong enough to hold the fish, be the future for the fish-and-chip trade? At least that would appease the health police. Should we rethink the thick, greasy chips, and offer something more delicate and infinitely crisp? Or should we simply leave it be, and hope that the few that have survived so far always will? As I write, my local chippy has just gone out of business.

The Italians have their feather-light zucchini flowers, the French their frites, the Spanish their cloud-like churros (which they then go on to soak in hot chocolate), and the Indians have pans full of crackling hot samosas. Snacks and vegetables, starters and side dishes, the world’s kitchens are full of food that has seen the inside of a pan full of deep, golden oil, but surely the British are the only ones so far to deep-fry one of their national dishes.

We drive to a pub that will later be thronged with the young and wannabe-young downing pints and Bacardi Breezers, but at lunchtime it is quiet, almost deathly so — there are just three couples in the place. All the men are wearing cardigans and ties, and judging by their hair the women have made slightly too much of an effort. The staff is appropriately welcoming, jolly even, and the muzak is low enough not to worry Auntie, though she would probably appreciate Shirley Bassey’s greatest hits if she could hear them.

The tables are as polished as the carpet is swirly, the horse-brasses are shining, the fire has even been lit, though on close inspection it turns out to be one of those gas-fed efforts that need no stacking or raking out. We order a shandy and a lemonade and lime. Auntie has a small sherry the colour of a mahogany commode. The menu is partly on laminated paper, partly on a blackboard proudly announcing Today’s Specials, which are, one suspects the same as yesterday’s specials.

There is home-made soup, though of what we’re not told, roast chicken or beef with ‘all the trimmings’, grilled lamb cutlets, and fillet of plaice either grilled or deep-fried with lemon. Someone has rubbed out the first and last letters from the ‘trimmings’, so what we are actually offered in the genteel delights of this suburban public house is roast beef and rimming, but I’m the only one who seems to understand, or indeed even to notice.

I toy with idea of ordering the vegetarian lasagne for a main course, but think better of it, the word ‘roast’ being a temptation too great to pass up in favour of something from a frozen catering-food supplier. My aunt peruses the menu and says how nice it all sounds, but we know she says it only to underline how much she appreciates the chance of looking at a menu at all. She has known she would order the grilled plaice since the alarm on the Teasmade went off this morning.

They make a bit of a fuss of bringing round the bread rolls, which are somehow neither white nor brown but something between the two, making much of the word warm, as in ‘Would anyone like a warm bread roll?’ Having taken a roll, I then find that the soup (vegetable, as it happens) comes with a roll on the side, so I now have two warm, neither brown nor white rolls to deal with.

The meal goes on like this, with the occasional ‘It’s always nice here, isn’t it?’ or ‘Have they changed those curtains since we were here last?’, for an interminable two hours, dawdling through pieces of plaice the size of kites and some rather good chips. The garnish is peas, of course, half a tomato and some cress. We finish with ‘home-made’ pie and custard and a crème caramel. On being asked if we are paying by credit card, my aunt pipes up snappily, ‘Cash, we don’t need any credit, thank you,’ totally misunderstanding the point of American Express.

We then take another age to get down the steps, after a fifteen-minute trip to the loo where she only powders her nose anyway, and slowly drive off home. On the way my aunt says how she wishes we could do this more often. ‘Yes, let’s,’ I say with as much enthusiasm as I can muster. ‘Yes, let’s.’

Nigel’s new book is Eating For England, a celebration of the British at Table. You can visit the book’s mobile website by texting ‘Nigel’ to 80880 – and find audio, video and more…

Anyone can work out 15 per cent, even after two glasses of champagne and a bottle of Pinot Noir. Now he’s unsure of whether to tip on top of the service charge or not. He decides to add a bit extra in cash, because he doesn’t want to look mean. Everyone tips on top of the service charge, don’t they? The problem is not whether to tip, but how much.

If there was no tip included it would be easy to work out, but he has already paid 12½ per cent, so what exactly does he put down on the plate now? If he adds another 3 per cent, it is going to look as if he forgot his change; another 10 per cent and he is going to look like a fool and his money. A fiver? A tenner? Or does he risk leaving nothing? The bill does say service is included, after all. It is a fine line between flashy jerk and tight git.

‘How much shall I leave?’

‘It’s included, isn’t it?’

‘Well, yes, but I bet they don’t get all of it.’

The waiter comes to remove the coffee cups. ‘Excuse me, but do you get the service charge, or do they pocket it?’

The words that in his head seemed like those of a nice guy, who cares about the welfare of the person who has looked after him and his date, now hang in the air like a giant fart.

‘Yes, we get the service charge, sir.’

He has been the model diner all evening, and now he feels like a sniping, suspicious weevil. He has accused the waiter’s bosses of ripping off their staff, and what is more, made the waiter look like a loser for accepting the situation. What had been so sweet, in the space of one short sentence has suddenly turned sour.

He compensates by over-tipping and rushes out of the restaurant, promising himself he will get it right next time.

Paris, Brussels, Rome. 11 p.m. He pulls out her chair, she moves towards the door and he casually takes a note from his wallet and slips it on the table. The waiter clocks it, smiles, nods and picks it up as discreetly as if he were brushing a crumb from his jacket. The note was neither mean nor cringingly excessive. It was not seen by his guest, and was done in a single, effortless move. Deal done.

Nigel’s new book is Eating For England, a celebration of the British at Table. You can visit the book’s mobile website by texting ‘Nigel’ to 80880 – and find audio, video and more…