You can now buy countdown calendars for Hallow’e’n. Yep. Just as it sounds. An ‘advent’ calendar to further inflame your insane excitement during what we are now - according to several press releases in September - going to start calling ‘Spooky Season’.
I have already vomitted myself dry so you don’t have to.
It is, of course, an American idea, and you can sort of see how it works with their calendar. They have All Hallows Evening, then Thanksgiving, when families get together for bad poultry and recrimination and buy Christmas they’re pretty much celebrated out.
We start with halloween which has always been a bit crap. I think I was probably in my early 20s before I realised that the entire thing wasn’t a pagan thing specifically for fully grown women to dress as weirdly eroticised schoolgirls and drink themselves into A&E. I mean... I still don’t get that bit. All Hallow’s Eve? Is it something to do with St Trinian?
We do, of course, have bonfire night, where we celebrate torturing Catholics to death. That’s always been a bit of a hoolie and a sort of unofficial opening to the Office party season that culminates in the bilious debauch of ‘Christmas’. Now a seven day ritual in which an entire nation pauses to celebrate our national characteristics of obesity and drunkenness.
But, there is hope. Something happens to in the first days of October and we need to find a new way to mark it. It’s either the turning of the calendar page, the browning of the leaves, the subtle realisation that it’s already dark as you mix your first martini, the arrival of the first ‘named’ storm. But we go through our wardrobes. We ritually fold and store the warm weather gear and think, with genuine pleasure, about buying a new coat. For foodies, there’s a complete brain wipe. We start looking a big pots and genuinely using words like ‘hearty’ in conversation. There isn’t an English word for hygge, but we have enough Nordic left in what passes for our blood to feel an upswelling of something very like it, at least for a few days, until we get a grip and think about getting the boiler serviced.
I dig out stew-pots. For six months, the nearest I’ve got to braising anything was reusing a teabag. Until Mayday, no unbraised morsel will pass my lips....
I start making soup.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been keen on a Big Bowl of Soup. I don’t think that’s how its supposed to work. Ramen comes in a bloody huge bowl, sure enough. But under the broth there’s a proper dinner.
No. I’m firmly convinced that small, rich cream soups are the way to go. With loads of bread.
We have a cultural issue with soup here in England. We’ve somehow concluded that it’s disgusting to slurp it from the bowl and we therefore need an armoury of special utensils and a full suite of manners to deal with it. All that cack about which way you tilt the bowl, how you swing your ‘special’ spoon. Infinite byzantine rules designed to stop you dripping consomme down your dickie... none of which have the slightest relevance to the joy of consuming something hot, rich and thick. Combined, it conspires to put you off soup for life.
But I love it in the autumn. I often make soup recreationally, usually at weekends when the wind is rattling the windows. Like today when, having cycled back from the market, through a gale, with two great bunches of local Cambridgeshire celery, I was hit by the soup urge.
Its my double cream of celery soup. Dead simple. You chop up onions, whole bunches of celery and, where you’re supposed to add potatoes to thinken, you use celeriac. Simmer the lot in milk. Until it’s softened enough to go in the blender. Blitz smooth and add loads of cream.
It’s rich as hell. Of course it is. That’s the whole point. Because it has no spoon.
On Fridays Saturdays and Sundays, our bakers do a sourdough ‘porridge’ loaf. It’s unbelieveably good. Softer in taste and texture than regular white sourdough. Less risen. It’s got a malty sweetness. They sell out in seconds and we don’t even tell people we bake them. It’s bonkers. Still can’t work that one out. I pick up a loaf at the weekend tear it into quarters and freeze it.
The soup (also portioned and frozen) has to be rich because you only need a very small bowl, and there’s no spoon. Just the curving crusts of the porridge bread as you tear it up. It’s chewy, it takes a while to get through , but the curve fits the sides of the tiny little bowl so, with a bit of practice, you’re polishing the glaze with the last heel of the bread.
Cream of mushroom, cream of cauliflower, cream of onion, cream of chicken. Laden with dairy. Amply salted. Enough umami to bring down a drone at 1000m, just enough to paint a quarter loaf of porridge bread... and no bloody spoon.