Wintering

I don't care how cold, wet and dark it is, it's still my favourite season, and I have the socks for it.

When the days are short and dark (and wet and cold), my focus turns inward. At home during the holidays it was easy to love the winter, despite the cold, because I could hole up on my sofa with a quilt over my knees and a hot water bottle at my back, candles twinkling on every surface. Now that I have to venture out into the dark and cold and wet, I need to take that feeling I have at home out into the wild. And by wild I mean I get into a heated car and go to my heated workplace, but whatever: I still wake up and leave the house a long time before dawn, and that’s a sight less cosy than waking with the light and wondering whether to stay in my fat bed or sit on my pillowy sofa.

It’s a cold wet winter this year. Traditionally, autumn and spring are the rainy seasons in central Italy, and winter alternates a few days of bitter cold with clear, crisp, sunny cold, and periods of balmy chill. For years we had a habit of eating lunch on New Year’s Day outside. Right now I am writing while thunder rolls overhead and the rain pours down relentlessly. It’s cold, especially to those of us accustomed to hot summers and therefore completely feeble about the cold (although let’s be real, I am even more feeble about the heat).

One of the things about living in Italy is that one eats very much according to the season. This isn’t something one has to do consciously: it’s very much that all that is available is whatever is growing at any given time. This can make following recipes challenging at times, if they assume that everything is available year round. But it also means that it’s easy to lean into all the heartiness of winter cooking. I buy a chicken and boil it with “odori” (parsley and celery and carrot and onion), and at the same time I roast up pumpkin or sweet potatoes with whatever other veg I have hanging around the fridge. When the chicken is done I drain off the stock, and take the meat off the bones to chop up small. Then I throw half the stock and the roasted veg into the blender, and when it’s pureed I add the chopped chicken. I eat a bowl of the soup, and then I portion it out and stick it in the freezer for cold tired evenings. There’s always a slight variation depending on the added veg: the current batch is more roasted pepper flavour than the one before. I freeze the rest of the stock, and it always comes in useful.

My freezer is always full of containers of roasted veg - they can be heated up quickly and added to a tin of beans or fish or a plate of pasta or rice for a quick comforting meal. I also make individual portions of lasagna, mainly with sausage and whatever veg I have (mushrooms or chestnuts or butternut squash - or all of those without the sausage for my vegetarian niece). I mix bechamel (packets of, not homemade because life’s too short) with my filling, build it up with plenty of Parmesan and three layers of lasagna sheets and those too go in the freezer. (Everything is stored in glass dishes that can go from the freezer to the oven).

When I was a teenager, on a night out in Rome we would finish the evening going to a place where you had to go downstairs, and there you’d get a big glass of beer and a round metal dish of sausage and potato. Years later I asked if anyone remembered where exactly this place was, and no one could remember the name of it, but everyone remembered it - schoolmates both older and younger than I. Sausage and potato roasted up together with a bit of garlic and rosemary is still my definition of a perfect winter meal - one to be eaten straight out of the oven, not saved for later. Sometimes we fancy it up with a mix of spicy and plain sausage, or add in cabbage or red onion but the OG version is still perfection.

It’s not that I’m trying to say that these are incredible recipes that everyone should try, it’s that they work for me as recipe formulas, and knowing that my freezer is full of meals I can easily access makes me feel as though I have some element of control, particularly when I’m cold and tired and wearying of leaving and coming home in the dark.

I feel a bit about my freezer as a I do about my knitwear cupboard: reassured that I can get through the winter feeling as though I am taking care of myself.

My absolutely top tip for making winter weather lose some of the challenging aspects is having the right raincoat (deluge-proof) and footwear (wellies or vulcanized leather). My raincoat has zipped pockets as well as large popper-closing ones that are huge enough for a water bottle or a book, and a waist tie. One day last week, on my way to my daughter’s shoes-off house, I tied the waist tie tightly, then filled up my top with my friulane in a bag, and a pair of socks, while everything else I needed was securely stuffed into the pockets. I zipped myself up, shoved my feet into my wellies (with wellie-socks) and set off into the storm quite happily. Buying a properly water-proof raincoat was something I put off for years, reasoning that it doesn’t generally rain that often (or so I believed) and my showerproof jackets and coats plus an umbrella and sturdy boots would be perfectly adequate… but I hate carrying an umbrella and then even if they are sprayed you have damp boots, and if the rain is hard enough (and Italian rain is very hard) even my Geox puffer starts to let in the rain. Proper rainwear is the way to go, and if it sometimes snows where you are, or whatever the weather, then it is absolutely worth spending the money on outerwear that won’t hold you back.

The thing about cold dark mornings is that the less steps there are to getting dressed, the better. Right now my dressing is very formulaic: cropped wide trousers and a chunky cashmere sweater, funky socks, boots; knit dress, thermal or wool tights, boots: long skirt, sweater or cardigan with a silk shirt, boots. The last option already has slightly too many steps with the addition of the shirt, so it’s the one I wear least. To be honest, so far this year, it feels as though winter is all about the socks.

The Christmas tree is down and packed away but the candles still twinkle and scent the air. The cosiness, the sense of hunkering down, of the festive season is still there. It hasn’t all vanished just because it’s January and everyone has decided to collectively complain. It’s not even as though everyone had a Christmas tree! I can see that the magnolia that we planted too close to the fence in my parents’ garden is full of fat buds, and no doubt the fruit trees are gathering their energy to blossom in a month or so, and nature’s spring will be on the way. But there are a good few months of winter temperatures, and leaving and coming home in the dark, and wearing layers of warm clothes yet, and I’m not willing to give them up for some dream of longer days and lighter clothes which will come in its own time. I don’t want to spend every season thinking about the next one, I want to be in the one that is going on around me, and I want to feel good about it, even when it’s cold and dark.