For me, this is the new year, the turn of time that I have been waiting for. Cold, clear days of yellow leaves and berries. Storms and rain. Woodsmoke and peace. I find autumn invigorating, and it has to be said that not a little part of that is about the food. The fruit trees I planted in my garden have deluged me with apples and pears, and I am even considering making my first ever crab apple jelly. So I suppose it’s no surprise that some of my favourite reading for this time of year is in cookbooks. Nigel Slater is the king of the heap, because his books are so readable as well as so eatable (if you see what I mean…), and because he shares my feeling about the season. As early as August, he is looking out for signs:
‘A scent of autumn crosses the garden, ghost like, this morning, as if someone had lit a fire under damp leaves. A favourite time of year approaches and, in me at least, there is a stirring of new energy. I celebrate with a substantial version of mushrooms on toast.’
Nigel Slater, Kitchen Diaries II
I read his Kitchen Diaries over breakfast usually, I must confess, with not much intention of cooking from them. The second volume is more popular with me than the first, but only because it’s a hardback, so it falls open in a way that means I can eat toast without having to use an elbow to pin the pages down. It was also a present from someone who truly understood the startling nature of my sheer greed for autumn and for food. To sit with a cup of coffee and turn my head from a page of pear and chocolate oat crumble to see the leaves of the pear tree turning is a deep, recurring pleasure. Even more so if it is only just light and I have to put the lamp on in the kitchen, or if the rain is clattering down onto the skylights. But I do cook from his books sometimes, and especially at this time of year, when I’m likely to face a glut of fruit and want to put it into a crumble or a cake, or when vegetables stare up at me from the fridge and explain that the only thing to do is to curry them. The recipes behave perfectly, and they are always delicious.
The newest addition to my autumn shelf of cookbooks has been around for a while, but somehow I managed to miss it when it first came out. More fool me. Sophie Dahl’s From Season to Season starts with autumn, which means she’s already in my good books, and she writes with such joy about the way food can reflect life that it is a happy thing just to sit and think about apple cider omelette or baked pumpkin with toasted greens. And then, last year, when I thought I couldn’t possibly add another lovely hardback set of recipes to my read and reread list, the National Trust sent a free copy of their cookbook. I think it was for renewing my membership, or maybe for paying it online. I can’t remember, because as soon as I saw the book, I made some tea and sat down to enjoy it. It’s the sort of cooking my mother would not approve of. Margarine is mentioned a good deal. But again, it divides its recipes by seasons, and autumn’s section is awash with plum and walnut cobbler, frosted beetroot cake and caramelised onion quiche. Yes!
When it comes to fiction, The Turn of the Screw is something I might read as the nights darken, though only if I can pluck up the courage. This ghost story (or is it?) is delivered, we are told, on Christmas Eve. But it suits itself just as well, if not even better, to the Eve of All Hallows. I’ve occasionally tried writing ghost stories myself, and failed dismally. Partly because it’s so hard, but, even more, because I tend to begin them in the late afternoon, and by the time I’ve imagined all the terrifying things they could contain, I have to turn all the lights on and get over myself.
Safer to turn to the countryside. Although not in Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party, where aristocratic snobbery and romantic intrigue end in a horrible, avoidable tragedy. Set on the eve of the First World War (‘It caused a mild scandal at the time, but in most people’s memories it was quite outshone by what succeeded it’), it is full of the ‘scent of damp leaves and woodsmoke’. “A dark night, a dry wind and you’ll get rabbits”, says the local poacher, while the idealistic lover of nature revels in ‘the small flurries of finches among the hawthorn berries in the hedge’.
This is also the season when I start to want to read Russian novels again (not in Russian, sadly. One day, one day…). Winter is when they really come into their own, but if you like stories with weather and landscape, Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album is hard to beat. Hunting is big here too and, like Colegate, Turgenev uses the countryside to show us a class system, to reveal those who are crushed by it and even those who escape from it, as well as the landowners who live off it. The stories start quietly (‘In the autumn woodcocks are frequently to be found in the ancient lime groves. There are a good many such lime groves in Oryol province’), gently accelerating until we are plunged into someone’s character, their dilemmas, the things they have suffered. But the gentleness stays, somehow, and like autumn sunshine, it’s welcome and exactly right.
Finally, there is the other thing that autumn has always been about. For longer than I care to think about, my working ‘new year’ has been the academic one. I hated school, but despite this, I love the thought of a new intellectual start, of new pencils and good notebooks and thought.
So books about academic life are bound to appeal, and especially during this season. My favourite has to be Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I tell myself I can’t possibly ever want to read it again, but I know, as soon as I look at the first sentence (‘The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation’), that I am going to have to gobble it all down again. This is a murder story where the thrill is in the why and the how, not in the who, and its characters pull you in and make you hate them even as you like them (well, some of them) and sympathise and need to know more. And for anyone who adores autumn, the narrator’s love affair with fall in New England is one of the joys of the book. He first encounters Hampden College in its prospectus:
‘Even now I remembered those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark windowpanes, snow.’
When he gets to see the real thing, and is drawn into the circle of friendship that will ultimately lead to murder, life comes into ‘a sharp, delightful focus’. ‘Around Halloween the last, stubborn wildflowers died away and the wind became sharp and gusty, blowing showers of yellow leaves’. It is then, as ‘Bare willows clicked on the windowpanes like skeleton fingers’, that Richard starts to learn what his friends have really been doing, and the awful results that will follow.
There is another twist, external to the story, which is somehow pleasing too. Tartt says that one of the reasons she wrote The Secret History was to prove her creative writing teacher wrong. He maintained that women couldn’t write male narrators. I think it is safe to say that the five million people who bought the book would disagree with him. And although there are critics who sneer and say it’s a young person’s book, in the wrong way, I don’t think anything else I’ve ever read quite catches that mixed feeling of intellectual awakening and dislocation that going away to university can generate (though murder, we hope, does not usually result).
Now, I prefer to enjoy that new term feeling from a distance, in a book. I’d rather be in the countryside, reading where I can see an apple tree, than anywhere near a hall of residence. But that doesn’t mean I can’t use the falling of the leaves to sharpen my mind as well as my pencils.