I wrote, in warmer times, about my love of lunches so unbelievably basic and rustic, so depressingly unadorned that they were positively medieval. A hunk of cheese on a board, with maybe an apple and a stack of oaty crackers. A fillet of mackerel, oily and stinking, with – er – maybe an apple. And a hunk of cheese. And a stack of oaty crackers. It’s the sort of thing you could imagine (taking away the crackers) an evil lord eating in the Dark Ages if he’d just beheaded his cook and had nobody to prepare him a venison stew. There he would sit in his castle, one of those really unaesthetic tapestries hanging behind him showing a boar being disemboweled by an angel, or an unimpressed owl holding a trumpet, whatever mad imagery they were into, and the lord would be hunched over his wooden board spearing his cheese with a pronged torture-fork and chopping his apple with his battleaxe. I have no problem with any of this. I don’t care that my lunches make me look like an evil lord and I am fine with the fact that they’re basic. But I tell you, as winter drags on and the damp penetrates my bones, these chopping board lunches just don’t hit the mark. I crave something more. Something equally wholesome and rustic that requires no preparation but that also doesn’t serve itself up totally fridge-cold. I need ideas and have been scouring my recipe books for some solutions.Now: don’t say soup. I know that soup exists, I’m not a moron. We quite regularly have soup at lunchtime, because it is easy and it is warm, but each and every time we have it I find myself staring out of the window and thinking how there must be more to life. If it was a good homemade french onion soup with gruyere croutons then that would be different, but it never is. It is soup bought from the shop. Because making soup from scratch takes longer than gestating an elephant.
