cookery – Kathleen Jowitt

Puff pastry tart filled with small green plums and a caramelised glaze, with sprigs of rosemary

The plum trees have gone absolutely bonkers this year. We missed the best of the Victorias – we always do – because we were on the Isle of Wight, though I managed to freeze three trays full against the winter months. The greengage, though, is doing better than I’ve ever seen it. I’ve made six jars of jam, there’s easily as much fruit again still on the tree, and a load on the ground as well. (It’s been such a hard summer, I’m leaving that for the birds.)

This tart comes from the original Roasting Tin book. Rukmini Iyer uses huge, beautiful purple plums, which look much prettier cooked. But she had a food stylist and (I assume) didn’t have a glut of greengages. It is extremely tasty no matter how it looks.

Anyway, it’s dead easy: lay out ready-made puff pastry in a lined roasting tin, cover with stoned halved plums of whatever variety (this was 400g, about 5 minutes worth of picking and 20 of prepping), skin side down; mix 75g soft brown sugar with a teaspoonful of ground cinnamon and about the same of finely chopped rosemary and sprinkle it over the plums; add a few more sprigs of rosemary, and bake at 220°C (200°C fan) for half an hour.

It was the first time I’ve used the “Green Ginger” variety of rosemary, too. It’s the furthest away from the door, but I thought it would be worth including it in this one. I’m not sure how much of a difference it really made, but since the whole thing was very pleasant I’ll probably do it again next year. Maybe with more rosemary.

There was marzipan left over after icing the Christmas cake, so, for the first time in my life, I made stollen. I used Delia Smith’s recipe, ignoring a couple of the fussier fruit ingredients. I stretched the dough further than it strictly needed to go, and it didn’t rise properly, but it’s really quite tasty. I’ve been eating it for breakfast ever since. (I’m the only one who likes marzipan, so…)

I was looking back at something I wrote earlier in the year in which I claimed that lockdown had, if anything, made me more adventurous in my cooking. From this distance all I can remember is fritters made from tinned sweetcorn. Which weren’t bad, I admit, but if I tried any other new recipes in the first half of the year I couldn’t tell you what they were.

Then things started fruiting. I dealt with a lot of the harvest using methods and recipes that live in my head (freezing; crumbles; freezing; chutneys…), but pickled plums were a new one on me. They turn out to be delicious: sweet-sour, with a delicate, almost floral, flavour underlying the vinegar.

After we’d been in this house for a few months the oven developed an irritating habit of blowing its fuse at unpredictable intervals. It went when I was cooking chocolate puddings; when I was preserving pears; when Tony was cooking sausages; other times I now forget. We weren’t completely deprived of oven in between visits from the electrician and the Samsung specialist (they disagreed what needed to be done to fix it), since our microwave also has an oven function, but it did make me a bit wary of baking. I made a courgette cake in it, but that’s about as far as it went.

Eventually the Samsung specialist tracked down the problem, replaced the offending component, and fixed the oven. (This is probably not a wise thing to type two days before Christmas, but there we go.) Since then I’ve made mince pies. (Shortcrust pastry, which is another thing I don’t need to look up, and mincemeat from a very elderly jar.) And stollen.