There's something about the smell of bacon under a hot grill on a dark evening that makes a kitchen feel like the right place to be. Add oysters to the equation and the room takes on a different charge: salt air and wood smoke, something a little reckless, the kind of cooking that says tonight is not an ordinary night.

Angels on horseback belong to the old British savoury course, that peculiar tradition of serving something sharp and salty after the pudding, a full stop to the meal rather than another comma. The Victorians understood what they were doing. A crisp, smoky parcel with a briny, yielding centre is the sort of mouthful that makes conversation stop for a second. It deserves reviving.

This is a winter thing, really. Oysters are at their best when the months have an R in them and the evenings draw in by four o'clock. I make these for New Year sometimes, or when someone comes for dinner and I want to start the evening with something that feels like a small occasion without requiring hours at the stove. Twelve oysters, six rashers of bacon, some good bread, and ten minutes under the grill. We're only making dinner. But it's the kind of dinner people remember.

I wrote it down in the notebook after the first time: bacon, oyster, toast, January. The squeeze of lemon. The look on someone's face. That was enough.