Autumn in pie form

A recipe from Diana Henry's magical book Roast Figs, Sugar Snow.

Welcome to the Pen and Spoon newsletter! This one is free for everyone, so please do me a favour and share it and help me spread the word. If you like what you read, and if it’s within your means, please consider upgrading to paid. For a little over £4 per month my newsletter will land in your inbox every month with a throughly researched article and tested recipe. Free subscribers receive a newsletter every other week, so it’s worth signing up for this too, so you receive the newsletters automatically. Many thanks and warm wishes, Sue X

My neighbour brought me a large plastic bag filled with fallen apples from his garden this week. His gift makes me ridiculously happy. I can see the apple tree from my kitchen window and I’ve been hankering after the red and yellow baubles, just as I do every year at this time. I’m stepping over apples on my daily walks, too. Apple trees are scattered across Hengistbury Head where I wander with my dog, and now the branches are trimmed with Christmas ornaments. The birds and I are ecstatic.

So, Diana Henry’s book Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: food to warm the soul, arrived through the letterbox with perfect timing this week. The original version is already a treasured part of my cookbook collection. But this a new edition of the gem she published almost 20 years ago, refreshed and revised (with seven new recipes that I know she worked very hard on) and the updated cover is exquisite.

If you’re not familiar with this book, it’s a paean to cooking during the colder months, a celebration of the ingredients, flavours, crisp air and pale skies that make autumn and winter so wonderful. The recipes are inspired by dishes enjoyed in many cold-weather climes, from northern Italy and Austria to Denmark and New Hampshire. As Nigel Slater puts it in his cover quote, “each paragraph is a carol’ to what makes cooking at this time of the year “something to cherish”.

Happily, there are many recipes that celebrate apples. I’m taken by the title of Hot Lightening (hete bliksem as it’s known in its native Holland), a hearty dish of potatoes, bacon, apples and pears roasted together. (I’ve just realised how closely it echos an old an old-English dish called Fidget Pie, which I’ve written about for Delicious magazine as part of an article about Florence White and will appear soon). The Steamed apple and marmalade pudding, which I’ve made before, is glorious, but I decided to save that for when the cold really starts to bite.

I wanted to make something delicious to take to a friend’s birthday celebration, so I opted for Friulian apple, walnut and poppy seed tart. Reading the recipe, it reminded me of the poppyseed and walnut roll sold at the local Italian delicatessen when I was a child. I don’t know what they were called (they looked like Hungarian Biegli, the walnut and poppyseed rolls, not the coiled Gubana from Northern Italy) but they fascinated me: not quite cake, not quite pastry, and filled with nuts and seeds of all things!

This is a delicious, grown up pudding, best enjoyed warm with softly whipped cream. I’m overwhelmed with work at the moment and was tempted to use shop-bought sweet crust for the pastry, but I’m so very glad I didn’t. It’s easy to make from scratch and quite special: very tender, scented with lemon zest and well worth the little effort involved. The filling is easy, too, and reminiscent of the mince meat in Christmas mince pies, but lighter, less rich, more flavoursome and much less sweet.

Diana has allowed me to share the recipes for which I’m grateful. Here it is, with her introduction.

Friulian apple, walnut and poppy seed tart

Friuli, in north east Italy, has a distinctive cuisine. The flavours of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Slovenia and Venice all come together here, and, perhaps because snow has always kept it rather cut off geographically, it has retained many old-fashioned dishes and its own culinary identity. Spices are used more here than in any other region of Italy. They love fruit too, especially apples, so there are recipes galore for apple tarts, such as this.

serves 8

for the pastry

250g (9oz) plain flour, plus more to dust

125g (4½0z) butter, chilled and chopped, plus more for the tin 115g (40z) caster sugar

1 tsp baking powder

finely grated zest of ½ lemon

1 tbsp grappa*

up to 2 tbsp cold milk

for the filling

3 tart eating apples

175g (Goz) walnuts

1½ tbsp grappa*

finely grated zest of ½ lemon

60g (2¼z) raisins

3 tbsp poppy seeds

½ tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground ginger ground seeds of 5 green cardamom pods

1. Put the four and butter in a food processor and pulse-blend until the mixture resembles crumbs. Add the caster sugar, baking powder and lemon zest and mix again, adding first the grappa and then the milk, until the pastry comes together in a ball (you may not need all the milk. Wrap in clingfilm and chill for at least 30 minutes.

2. Butter a 22-23cm (8½-9 inch) springform cake tin.

3. Divide the dough into 2 pieces: the first from two-thirds of the dough and the second from one-third. On a floured surface, roll out the larger piece and use it to line the bottom and 4cm (1½ inches) up the sides of the prepared tin. Chill. Roll the smaller piece of pastry into a circle just slightly larger than the cake tin. Put it on a floured metal sheet and let that chill, too.

4. Preheat the oven to 190°C fan (400°F), Gas 6 and put a metal baking sheet into it.

5. To make the filling, peel, core and grate the apples, chop the walnuts and mix both with all the other ingredients. Pile this into the lined cake tin and place the other circle of pastry on top. Pinch the edges of the pastry together and then crimp them. Cut a little star, to let the steam out, in the middle of the pastry top. Put on the hot baking sheet in the preheated oven and cook for 30 minutes.

6. Let the tart cool in the tin, then carefully remove it. Sift icing sugar over the top and scatter with poppy seeds. Serve with whipped cream to which you have added another slosh of grappa.

• I used vodka instead of grappa because I didn't have: it has less flavour, but worked very well.