Nigel Slater’s kitchen diary: a sticky fig pudding to foil the fickleness of spring

Spring is a season of false starts. A couple of days of leaving the house without a coat, gardening in short sleeves and lunching on salads of feta, spinach and blood oranges, then back to lighting the fire and suppers of bean soup and sticky pudding. The uncertainty requires a cook to think on their feet. No bad thing.

A few days spent working in the garden in glorious sunshine came to a close this week with surprisingly chilly evenings and a search for the most bolstering of suppers. Baked potatoes were stuffed with pork rillettes and much wine was consumed, but what was really needed was the sweet, sweet medicine of a sticky pudding. Sugary crumbs and a treacly sauce to warm us to the marrow.

Such puddings are a rare treat in this house, even in the depths of winter. In early spring, even more so. A Bramley apple crumble, yes, the occasional bay-scented rice pudding, even a bread-and-butter pud, but to dig deep into a crock casserole of treacle-laced dough and syrupy sauce is unusual. I made one this week that served its purpose admirably. With brown sugar, figs and ginger, the kitchen smelled almost Dickensian as the pudding rose in the oven and the creamy brown-sugar sauce bubbled on the hob. A ridiculously sweet offering, but one that ticked every box on a day when spring was being its usual capricious self.

A rib-sticker pudding wasn’t the only rich offering on the table this week. A pork chop, its rim of fat gilded and crisped, came with a mustard sauce. We wiped our plates with leaves of pink-freckled castelfranco radicchio, the “winter rose” of salad leaves. Another night, warmer altogether, I made tiny cakes of ricotta and spring onions that puffed up like cushions. Basically, a standard omelette, but with the egg whites beaten until thick and folded into the yolks with cooked spring onions and a little ricotta cheese.

My soufflé omelettes were accompanied by a softly spiced carrot preserve from Maria Kalenska’s new book Cuisines of Odesa. A recipe from the Karyosaram family with its roots in both Odesa and Korea. Coarsely grated, the carrots and their seasonings – sea salt, mashed garlic, ground coriander and rice vinegar – are shaken together with a little sunflower oil and a pinch of chilli flakes, then stored in the fridge for a few days. As well as a side order for our fluffy cheese omelettes, w e pushed the crisp, spiced carrots into pork baps, their buns studded with sesame seeds.

It has been a week of heavy lifting and spring cleaning. Not only has the larder been stripped out from top to bottom, but every room in the house. I even had the chimneys swept and finally, the last of the Christmas tree needles rescued from under the sofas. Yes, I know it’s March.

The seasons have always been, and always will be, at the heart of this kitchen. The ebb and flow of ingredients going in and out of their moment is what makes me want to cook. The constantly changing shopping bag with which I come home, and its fluctuating contents, is what guides my cooking and my daily eating. As so often at this time of year, I become a little impatient for the change, for long sunny days, for plates of asparagus and the first strawberries, for dinners outdoors and plumes of thyme-scented smoke wafting over the garden wall. Until then, there’s pudding.