Head south for winter

Down in Padstow, as the evenings draw in at the restaurant, we ease ourselves into winter by rewriting our menus, moving away from the fragrant and delicate towards more warming flavours. Often it’s just our approach to ingredients that changes – replacing fresh with caramelised garlic, say – but we also like to celebrate seasonal treats such as lobster, truffles, porcini mushrooms and mussels.

The time that I spent in the Mediterranean filming my last TV series gave me a fresh perspective on seasonality. I had always equated Mediterranean cuisine with the sun, but there are months when the sun doesn’t shine so brightly. Up high in the hilltop villages of Corsica, it gets quite cold in winter and even snows. Here, game is a major part of the winter fare; wild boar in particular. They stew it with red wine, along with roasted chestnuts and chanterelles, until it’s meltingly tender, then serve it with pulenda, a kind of sticky porridge that’s made from chestnut flour.

This food of the cold months hasn’t been adulterated for tourists, as so much summer food has

Game is also popular in Italy. In Puglia I was offered a wonderful dish of roast partridges with a gravy made from the local sweet vin santo and grapes. But it was in a remote Sardinian town called Oliena that I met Tonina Biseu, who cooked me a simple pheasant dish. She baked it with potatoes, onions and woody herbs gathered from the mountain. A no-nonsense cook, she gave me the profound advice that ‘you must always look to the past to create dishes of the future.’ It got me thinking: this food of the colder months is so authentic – it hasn’t been adulterated for tourists in the way that so much Mediterranean summer food has.

Another fascinating character I met lived in Corfu town; a young Greek called Nikos, he had arrived from New York with a host of cold-weather recipes under his hat. He cooked us a great rabbit stew, flavoured with shallots, cinnamon and currants. Another speciality of Corfu is pastitsio, a sensational dish in which pasta is mixed with Kefalotiri cheese and layered with a white sauce and a cinnamon-flavoured beef one. It’s ideal for feeding lots of people on a chilly night.

The main difference between the Mediterranean and England, I felt, was our continental cousins’ enthusiasm for preserving. Everything is preserved; Sardinians salt the roe of the grey mullet to make bottarga. To me, this is as heavenly as caviar and wonderful grated into linguine. In Corsica, I tried a pork and liver sausage called figatellu; lightly smoked and air-dried, it gives much of the local food a distinctive flavour.

Fresh vegetables are preserved at harvest time, when fields and kitchens are buzzing with activity

Gluts of fresh vegetables are preserved at harvest time, when fields and kitchens are buzzing with activity. What I hadn’t witnessed before was the sun-drying of puréed tomatoes – in Sicily, this is used to make a pungent, concentrated paste called strattu. The resulting putty-like substance is then used throughout the winter to give tomato sauces extra body.

Another revelation to me was the use of dried broad beans. Fresh beans are dried, then in winter they’re cooked until soft and mashed. I’m surprised this kind of dish hasn’t caught on with more London restaurants.

It’s the creativity and resourcefulness of Mediterranean cooks that makes their winter food so exciting. Seasonality is a just a way of life, born out of the frugality of rural cooking. As Patience Gray observed in her 1987 book about Mediterranean life, Honey from a Weed, it is ‘poverty rather than wealth (that) gives the good things of life their true significance’. How right she was.